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    STUDIA INFORMATICA - Issue no. Sp. Issue 1 / 2014  
         
  Article:   THE EFFECTS OF USING EXCEPTION HANDLING ON SOFTWARE COMPLEXITY.

Authors:  ZOLTÁN PORKOLÁB. 		 
       
         
  Abstract:   Exception handling is the de finitive way to handle errors of any kind and exceptional circumstances in modern software. There has been a long way before software methodology arrived to creating and using the notion of exceptions. We automatically assume that using exception handling makes our software more readable, more maintainable and easier to understand - i.e. less complex than when we use any other error management (let it be using return values, ERRNO or any other kind). Is this really the case? Measuring software complexity can be done using software metrics.There are several trivial, well-known candidates - lines of code, cyclomatic complexity or McCabe-metrics and A-V - for this purpose, however these metrics do not measure exception constructs, therefor their usage can lead to distorted results[12]. In this paper, we extend the defi nitions of two metrics to the case of exceptions and analyze how these extensions aff ects these metrics on diff erent error handling constructs. The extension are validated by the conformance to Weyuker`s axioms and by real-world examples. We also examine industrial-sized software to prove that our defi nitions have no negative eff ect on the complexity measured by these metrics.

2010 Mathematics Subject Classi fication. 68N19.1998 CR Categories and Descriptors. D.1.5 [Software]: Programming techniques -Object-oriented programming.

Key words and phrases. Exceptions, software metrics.
 
         
     
         
         
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