Software Engineering and Fault Tolerance
Research Group
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Software Engineering and
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Reusable software components should be robust, i.e., they should incorporate exceptional activities in order to maintain a reliable behavior even in the occurrence of faults. Exception handling is a structured technique which deals with unexpected situations such as manifestation of faults. It implements all measures necessary to recover the stable state of the systems.
The software development process has influence on the system reliability. The process should guide the identification of faults and their appropriated handlers. However, the current lack of error-handling techniques and tools to develop dependable systems has lead developers to consider exceptions only on the later phases of software development. This ad hoc approach sometimes does not consider some exceptions because of unsystematic way to do that. The developers have been guided only by their intuition.
In this context, we propose a systematic and effective approach where exceptional activities are considered during all the component lifecycle in a structured form. We also propose the development of a CASE tool to support an effective use of this approach. This tool will support all process phases and help in the identification of errors. The feasibility of this approach will be checked with a case study.