Handling Exceptional Conditions with Grace and Style

Talk video

Talk presentation

Programmers naturally give more attention to a “happy path” - default scenario in application execution in which everything works as expected, therefore neglecting the opposite way things can go. Topics such as dealing with exceptional conditions, use of exceptions, error handling seem to have been insufficiently studied, and it is very difficult to find useful explanations and tutorials online.

This talk is an in-depth study about practices for dealing with exceptional conditions that promote code that is clean, consistent and convenient to work with. Special attention is given to applicable best practices for managing exceptions in a proper way, such as formatting exception messages, component-level exception type, exception wrapping.

To make the story complete, second part of the talk introduces framework-agnostic solution for establishing central error handling system that makes this critical aspect of the software stable, unambiguous and easy to maintain.

At the very end, some attention is given to testing exceptions and ways for keeping test code consistent and readable.