Work

The Impact of Program Reduction on Automated Program Repair

Year: 2024

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Correcting bugs using modern Automated Program Repair (APR) can be both time-consuming and resource-expensive. We describe a program repair approach that aims to improve the scalability of modern APR tools. The approach leverages program reduction in the form of program slicing to eliminate code irrelevant to fixing the bug, which improves the APR tool's overall performance. We investigate slicing's impact on all three phases of the repair process: fault localization, patch generation, and patch validation. Our empirical exploration finds that the proposed approach on average enhances the repair ability of the TBar APR tool, but we also discovered a few cases where it was less successful. Specifically, on examples from the widely used Defects4J dataset, we obtain a substantial reduction in median repair time, which falls from 80 minutes to just under 18 minutes. We conclude that program reduction can improve the performance of APR without degrading repair quality, but this improvement is not universal.

Source: IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

DOI: 10.1109/icsme58944.2024.00039

Authors: Linas Vidziunas, David Binkley, Leon Moonen

Institutions: Simula Research Laboratory, Loyola University Maryland, BI Norwegian Business School

Language: English

Topic: Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Norges Forskningsråd

Award: G6334488888