Parichayana: An Eclipse Plugin for Detecting Exception Handling Anti-Patterns and Code Smells in Java Programs
This tool addresses code quality issues for Java developers, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing code smell detection capabilities.
The authors tackled the problem of detecting exception handling anti-patterns and code smells in Java programs by developing an Eclipse plugin called Parichayana, which automatically identifies common programming mistakes and was tested on large open-source projects.
Anti-patterns and code-smells are signs in the source code which are not defects (does not prevent the program from functioning and does not cause compile errors) and are rather indicators of deeper and bigger problems. Exception handling is a programming construct de- signed to handle the occurrence of anomalous or exceptional conditions (that changes the normal flow of program execution). In this paper, we present an Eclipse plug-in (called as Parichayana) for detecting exception handling anti-patterns and code smells in Java programs. Parichayana is capable of automatically detecting several commonly occurring excep- tion handling programming mistakes. We extend the Eclipse IDE and create new menu entries and associated action via the Parichayana plug- in (free and open-source hosted on GitHub). We compare and contrast Parichayana with several code smell detection tools and demonstrate that our tool provides unique capabilities in context to existing tools. We have created an update site and developers can use the Eclipse up- date manager to install Parichayana from our site. We used Parichyana on several large open-source Java based projects and detected presence of exception handling anti-patterns