Reasoning and Improving on Software Resilience against Unanticipated Exceptions

In software, there are the errors anticipated at specification and design time, those encountered at development and testing time, and those that happen in production mode yet never anticipated. In this paper, we aim at reasoning on the ability of software to correctly handle unanticipated exceptions. We propose an algorithm, called short-circuit testing, which injects exceptions during test suite execution so as to simulate unanticipated errors. This algorithm collects data that is used as input for verifying two formal exception contracts that capture two resilience properties. Our evaluation on 9 test suites, with 78% line coverage in average, analyzes 241 executed catch blocks, shows that 101 of them expose resilience properties and that 84 can be transformed to be more resilient.

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Source https://hal.science/hal-00922937
Author Cornu, Benoit, Seinturier, Lionel, Monperrus, Martin
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 7, 2026, 16:28 (UTC)
Created May 7, 2026, 16:28 (UTC)
Identifier Report N°: hal-00922937
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware (ADAM) ; Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille (LIFL) ; Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et Sociales-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et Sociales-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Centre Inria de l'Université de Lille ; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)
creator Cornu, Benoit
date 2013-05-07T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 0bf4b8ca-7589-40d9-bea8-ea05f7e7531a
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-02-26T00:00:00
relation info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/arxiv/1401.0191
set_spec type:REPORT