relifix: Automated Repair of Software Regressions

Tan, Shin Hwei; Roychoudhury, Abhik

doi:10.1109/icse.2015.65

Cited by 65 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The promising results will also hopefully motivate development of robust static RTS tools that can be adopted in practice. The method-level analysis is currently not useful for RTS but may still be useful for other tasks, e.g., debugging regression failures [38].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An extensive study of static regression test selection in modern software evolution

Legunsen

Hariri

Shi

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Regression test selection (RTS) aims to reduce regression testing time by only re-running the tests affected by code changes. Prior research on RTS can be broadly split into dynamic and static techniques. A recently developed dynamic RTS technique called Ekstazi is gaining some adoption in practice, and its evaluation shows that selecting tests at a coarser, class-level granularity provides better results than selecting tests at a finer, method-level granularity. As dynamic RTS is gaining adoption, it is timely to also evaluate static RTS techniques, some of which were proposed over three decades ago but not extensively evaluated on modern software projects.This paper presents the first extensive study that evaluates the performance benefits of static RTS techniques and their safety; a technique is safe if it selects to run all tests that may be affected by code changes. We implemented two static RTS techniques, one class-level and one methodlevel, and compare several variants of these techniques. We also compare these static RTS techniques against Ekstazi, a state-of-the-art, class-level, dynamic RTS technique. The experimental results on 985 revisions of 22 open-source projects show that the class-level static RTS technique is comparable to Ekstazi, with similar performance benefits, but at the risk of being unsafe sometimes. In contrast, the method-level static RTS technique performs rather poorly.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An extensive study of static regression test selection in modern software evolution

Legunsen

Hariri

Shi

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We used real faults, isolated by Böhme and Roychoudhury [12] and used by other researchers [36], [54]. Since these faults were found on well-tested widely-used programs, we believe that they are representative of faults that are hard to find, but further research is required to test this belief.…”

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study on Mutation, Statement and Branch Coverage Fault Revelation That Avoids the Unreliable Clean Program Assumption

Chekam

Papadakis

Traon

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

117

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Many studies suggest using coverage concepts, such as branch coverage, as the starting point of testing, while others as the most prominent test quality indicator. Yet the relationship between coverage and fault-revelation remains unknown, yielding uncertainty and controversy. Most previous studies rely on the Clean Program Assumption, that a test suite will obtain similar coverage for both faulty and fixed ('clean') program versions. This assumption may appear intuitive, especially for bugs that denote small semantic deviations. However, we present evidence that the Clean Program Assumption does not always hold, thereby raising a critical threat to the validity of previous results. We then conducted a study using a robust experimental methodology that avoids this threat to validity, from which our primary finding is that strong mutation testing has the highest fault revelation of four widely-used criteria. Our findings also revealed that fault revelation starts to increase significantly only once relatively high levels of coverage are attained.

show abstract

“…We have discussed in this paper a template-based patch generation approach. PAR by [8] uses 10 patch templates for common programming errors, Relifix [20] defines templates specifically for regression bugs. All of those approaches require a regression test suite to validate the patch, none of them leverage production traffic to assess the absence of regressions.…”

Section: A Patch Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic patch generation for null pointer exceptions using metaprogramming

Durieux

Cornu

Seinturier

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Null pointer exceptions (NPE) are the number one cause of uncaught crashing exceptions in production. In this paper, we aim at exploring the search space of possible patches for null pointer exceptions with metaprogramming. Our idea is to transform the program under repair with automated code transformation, so as to obtain a metaprogram. This metaprogram contains automatically injected hooks, that can be activated to emulate a null pointer exception patch. This enables us to perform a fine-grain analysis of the runtime context of null pointer exceptions. We set up an experiment with 16 real null pointer exceptions that have happened in the field. We compare the effectiveness of our metaprogramming approach against simple templates for repairing null pointer exceptions.

show abstract

relifix: Automated Repair of Software Regressions

Cited by 65 publications

References 32 publications

An extensive study of static regression test selection in modern software evolution

An extensive study of static regression test selection in modern software evolution

An Empirical Study on Mutation, Statement and Branch Coverage Fault Revelation That Avoids the Unreliable Clean Program Assumption

Dynamic patch generation for null pointer exceptions using metaprogramming

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About