PVS Award Winner

This PVS award goes to the developer of this code (sanitized to avoid NDA violations).  While trying to troubleshoot an issue one day, the stack trace was always null.  Huh?  null stack trace?  How does that happen? 

The following class is in a shared library jar, and is used as the base class for many different application-specific exception classes in several apps.
 

public class MYException extends Exception {

...

    public MyException(String message, Throwable cause) {
        super(message);
        initializeCause(cause);
    }

    public Throwable initializeCause(Throwable cause)  throws IllegalArgumentException IllegalStateException {
        // ... some code here that conditionally throws those exceptions depending on what cause is, followed by this gem... \\
        mCause = cause;
        mStackTrace = null;  // clear a stack trace
        return this;
    }
...
    public void printStackTrace() { printStackTrace(System.err); }

    public void printStackTrace(PrintStream stream) {
        if (mStackTrace != null) {
            super.printStackTrace();
            if (mCause != null) {
                stream.print("Caused by: ");
                mCause.PrintStackTrace();
            }
        } else {
            stream.print(mStackTrace);
        }
    }

So printStackTrace always prints null.