A catalogue of bug patterns for exception handling in aspect-oriented programs

Aspects allow a developer to externally add new functionality to a program. This additional functionality may also throw new exceptions that will flow through the program execution until they are handled. Moreover, aspects can also be used to handle exceptions thrown by base code or even other aspects. Unfortunately, exceptions thrown by aspects --- or exceptions that should be handled by them --- may flow through the program execution in unexpected ways leading to failures such as uncaught exceptions or exceptions being caught by the wrong handlers. In a previous empirical study we investigated the causes of such failures in Aspect-Oriented programs. In this paper we present causes of such failures as a catalogue of bug patterns for exception handling in Aspect-Oriented programs.