Title: Software development life cycle model to inculcate exception handling

Authors: Suburayan Velmourougan; Dhavachelvan Ponnurangam; Baskaran Ramachandran

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Information Technology, MCIT, Government of India, Dr. VSI Estate, Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Pin 600041, India ' Department of Computer Science Engineering, Pondicherry University, R.V. Nagar, Kalapet, Puducherry, Pin 605014, India ' Department of Computer Science Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, Chennai-Tamil Nadu, Pin 600025, India

Abstract: Application systems with misuse and many times with unusual use cases end up with the exceptions. These latent flaws, due to the unexpected or special conditions are to be mitigated during the development process itself. Exception handling has not been given dedicated attention by the developers during the development process and mostly it is examined under the functionality issues. As the modern complex software exhibits enormous unexpected exception during its usage, the demand for good practices to solve these issues is getting augmented. In that perspective, this paper presents a set of generic good practices to be observed during each phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC) for establishing the application system with sound exception handling mechanism. The exception handling-SDLC (EH-SDLC) model proposed in this paper outlines various activities and tasks that are to be practiced by the developer to inculcate the strong exception handling constructs in the application. The activities and tasks addressed here are based on the real-time test results. The paper also demonstrates the results of the comparative studies performed on an application to quantitatively show that how the good practices would influence on the product reliability as a bill of exception handling.

Keywords: software development life cycle; SDLC; best practice; exception handling; scenario-based testing; maintenance; product reliability; software testing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAET.2015.071300

International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology, 2015 Vol.7 No.3, pp.401 - 420

Received: 19 Jun 2013
Accepted: 30 Dec 2013

Published online: 20 Aug 2015 *

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