Exceptional Development

Exceptions are raised when an exceptional condition is true within a program. Most object-oriented languages define a base exception class which developers can use to derive custom exception hierarchies.

These exception hierarchies can grow to be quite large, even in production systems. This makes sense if we want to use the exception handling mechanism in a polymorphic way. We handle all exceptions at one level of the hierarchy, including all descendant exceptions, while ignoring all exceptions at a higher level up.

These hierarchies allow us to reason about what as gone wrong. So using an aggressive approach to exception handling during initial development might make a lot of sense. Construct a list of every conceivable exceptional path that isn't part of the successful path. Generalize some of the exceptions so you avoid unnecessary duplication.

With this first initial exception hierarchy, you can pound out a first iteration quickly. The fact that none of these exceptions in the hierarchy are raised is an indicator that the iteration is complete.