Parichayana: An Eclipse Plugin for Detecting Exception Handling Anti-Patterns and Code Smells in Java Programs

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 designed 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 exception handling programming mistakes. We extend the Eclipse IDE and create new menu entries and associated action via the Parichayana plugin (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 update 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.