ExceptionPolicyExpert: A Tool to Assist the Exception Handling Development 

Exception handling, recommendation tools, Grounded Theory. 

Nowadays, there is a strong need for the development of robust software systems. The exception handling mechanism is one of the most used techniques to support the development of robust software systems. The exception handling policy comprises the set of rules that specify how exceptions should be thrown and handled inside a system. But usually the policy is not explicitly defined. As a consequence, it becomes a challenge for developers to create the exception handling code according to it. This work proposes an Eclipse plug-in, called ExceptionPolicyExpert, to guide the developer on how to implement this kind of code by checking policy violations and providing recommendations to developers concerning how to handle exceptions. In order to support the creation of such tool, we performed a qualitative study, using Grounded Theory techniques, to understand which are the main challenges that the developers have during the implementation of the exception handling code. This study showed that most of the developers did not receive any instructions regarding the exception handling policy and they often handle exceptions in a wrong way. Therefore, the proposed tool aims to provide information to developers regarding the exception handling policy integrated to the IDE - helping him/her to develop exception handling code and preventing policy violations. To evaluate this tool, we propose an experiment using the Latin Square experimental design.