Hibersafe: Curating StackOverflow for Hibernate Exception-related Bugs
Exception Handling, Java, Hibernate, Stack Overflow, Crowd Knowledge
Hibernate is a popular object-relational mapping framework for Java used to support data persistence. It provides code annotations that are processed and the persistence process occurs. The way annotations are processed, however, is not easy to understand for most of software developers who use this framework. Also, its documentation appears to be incomplete with regard to exceptional behaviors that occur with the use of annotations. Therefore, this work seeks to provide ways to help developers to better understand and then fix exceptionalrelated bugs that may arise when using Hibernate annotations. In the proposed approach, the crowd knowledge provided by StackOverflow - in this case, questions and its answers about Hibernate - is used by a tool, called Hibersafe, which aims to help developers find better solutions to the exception-related bugs they face and identify the possible annotation-exception relationship that may have caused it. We compared the tool with the traditional approach using the Google search engine, the main source of information used by developers when an error occurs. Our tool was more efficient and accurate on tested scenarios when compared to Google. It showed that it could be used as a sort of curator for Hibernate exception-related bugs.