A Cooperative Action (CO action) is a modelling abstraction for representing collaborative behaviour between objects at different phases of the software development. In this paper, the original definition of a cooperative object-oriented approach for software development is extended in order to include the description of exceptional behaviour. Unlike the traditional methods that usually deal with exceptions at late design and implementation phases, the proposed approach emphasises the separation of treatments of application-related, design-related, and implementation-related exceptions during the software lifecycle. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated in terms of a benchmark case study.