Automated Program-Semantic Defect Repair and False-Positive Elimination without Side Effects

Abstract

The alarms of the program-semantic defect-detection report based on static analysis include defects and false positives. The repair of defects and the elimination of false positives are time-consuming and laborious, and new defects may be introduced in the process. To solve these problems, the safe constraints interval of related variables and methods are proposed for the semantic defects in the program, and proposes a functionally equivalent no-side-effect program-semantic defect repair and false-positive elimination strategy based on the test-equivalence theory. This paper realizes the automatic repair of the typical semantic defects of Java programs and the automatic elimination of false positives by adding safe constraint patches. After the repair, the program functions are equivalent and the status of each program point is within the safety range, so that the functions before and after the defect repair are consistent, and the functions and semantics before and after the false positives are eliminated. We have evaluated our approach by repairing 5 projects; our results show that the repair strategy does not require manual confirmation of alarms, automated repair of the program effectively, shortened the repair time greatly, and ensured the correctness of the program after the repair.