Staged program repair with condition synthesis

Abstract

We present PCR, a new automatic patch generation system. PCR uses a new condition synthesis technique to efficiently discover logical expressions that generate desired controlflow transfer patterns. Presented with a set of test cases, PCR deploys condition synthesis to find and repair incorrect if conditions that cause the application to produce the wrong result for one or more of the test cases. PCR also leverages condition synthesis to obtain a set of compound modifications that generate a rich, productive, and tractable search space of candidate patches.We evaluate PCR on a set of 105 defects from the GenProg benchmark set. For 40 of these defects, PCR generates plausible patches (patches that generate correct outputs for all inputs in the test suite used to validate the patch). For 12 of these defects, PCR generates correct patches that are functionally equivalent to developer patches that appear in subsequent versions. For comparison purposes, GenProg generates plausible patches for only 18 defects and correct patches for only 2 defects. AE generates plausible patches for only 27 defects and correct patches for only 3 defects.

A Survey of Test Based Automatic Program Repair

“…For example, the Null Pointer Checker template can be applied where there is object reference in the statement. Similar idea is also proposed by Long et al [31], which work SPR derived parameterized transformation schemas to customize the fault type and repairing behaviors.…”

Contract-based program repair without the contracts

“…SPR [16] also combines condition synthesis with a dynamic analysis of the value each abstract conditional expression should take to make all tests pass, which helps aggressively prune the search space when no plausible repair exists. Prophet [17] improves SPR with a probabilistic model learned by mining programmer-written fixes.…”

Automated repair of layout cross browser issues using search-based techniques

“…Several techniques that use search-based algorithms have been proposed. Two examples include GenProg [20,56], which uses genetic programming to nd viable repairs for C programs, and SPR [23], which uses a staged repair strategy to search through a large space of candidate xes. Alternative analytical approaches also exist, including FixWizard [39], which analyzes bug xes in a piece of code and suggests comparable xes to similar parts of the code base; and FlowFixer [62], which repairs sequences of GUI interactions in modi ed test scripts for Java programs.…”