At my former company we had a vision of removing/fixing all unhandled exceptions that we found (and that we thought a customer might encounter). After some discussions we decided that the unhandled exceptions should be treated in the same way as we had treated severe errors on previous platforms. I.e. Crashes in C++; NullPointerExceptions in Java; “Runtime Errors” in VB; and “Script Errors” in JavaScript.
This was a philosophy that both testers and programmers agreed upon (more or less) and it fitted our context.

Now, for the last two years I have been working as a test consultant; and during these years I have been on a couple of customer sites where their applications have been developed in C# .Net.

When unhandled exceptions occur, many team-members and users that I have been observing just click “Continue” and continue with their work as if nothing happened. And when I afterwards have asked them why they did so, it appears that they never reflected upon the error and if it might have been severe.
Many say that they don’t see the unhandled exception as a crash, or “Soft Crash”, instead they have seen it as a warning or an error that “really shouldn’t be in there”; some people see it as an error that in fact is handled, hence the error message and the pop-up dialog box.
Sometimes I point out that after an unhandled exception you cannot be sure about the state that the application is in, and that any behavior afterwards might be affected by the first “crash”. But I rarely hear anyone else saying this.

I am not saying that hard crashes are to be preferred in any way, but then you at least understood that something was severe.

I think that soft crashes give users/developers/testers/stakeholders/etc a false sense of safety.
And I blame the “good handling of unhandled exceptions” that the .Net framework provides. In fact, I blame the “Continue” button of those dialogs.

What are your experiences and thoughts regarding this?

(This was originally posted as a new thread on the Context-Driven Software Testing list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/software-testing/message/5794 )