Towards a catalogue of Java exception handling bad smells and refactorings

ABSTRACTSoftware is made by humans for human use and, for that reason, it is bound to fail. As language designers accepted failure as an inevitable factor, mechanisms had to be created to deal with it. Java was designed with an elaborate built-in exception handling mechanism which allowed programmers to anticipate failures and prepare the application to deal with them from a high level point of view. However, the exception handling code designed to make a system more robust often works the other way around and become a burden programmers have to cope with. Some guidelines on how to better cope with the exception handling code have been proposed, papers have been written on this topic and tools have been built, nevertheless, such pieces of information are spread and structured in different ways. This paper aims to collect such guidelines on good and bad practices from different sources and compile it as a catalogue of bad smells and associated refactorings as a way to help new and experienced developers improve the exception handling code of Java programs.