Exception handling negligence due to intra-individual goal conflicts

Despite research to provide support for improving the usage of exception handling in programs, studies show that exception handling is neglected. In previous work, we interviewed novice developers to understand their problems when dealing with exceptions. The results show that these developers gave exception handling low priority and they thought that use of exception handling was forced on them. Thus, developers adopted an ignore-for-now approach for dealing with exceptions. In this paper, we present the results of our investigation of this problem of neglecting exception handling. We conducted a literature study to understand the psychological aspects of the problem that may be affecting the appropriate usage of exception handling in programs. Based on our investigation that was supported by this study, we believe that developers have intra-individual conflicting goals when they are expected to design and code the core functionality as well as the exception handling functionality. We recommend some strategies to address this problem of conflicting goals at academic and industry levels.