IFixR: Bug report driven program repair

Anil Koyuncu, Kui Liu, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Dongsun Kim, Martin Monperrus, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

78 Scopus citations

Abstract

Issue tracking systems are commonly used in modern software development for collecting feedback from users and developers. An ultimate automation target of software maintenance is then the systematization of patch generation for user-reported bugs. Although this ambition is aligned with the momentum of automated program repair, the literature has, so far, mostly focused on generate-and- validate setups where fault localization and patch generation are driven by a well-defined test suite. On the one hand, however, the common (yet strong) assumption on the existence of relevant test cases does not hold in practice for most development settings: many bugs are reported without the available test suite being able to reveal them. On the other hand, for many projects, the number of bug reports generally outstrips the resources available to triage them. Towards increasing the adoption of patch generation tools by practitioners, we investigate a new repair pipeline, iFixR, driven by bug reports: (1) bug reports are fed to an IR-based fault localizer; (2) patches are generated from fix patterns and validated via regression testing; (3) a prioritized list of generated patches is proposed to developers. We evaluate iFixR on the Defects4J dataset, which we enriched (i.e., faults are linked to bug reports) and carefully-reorganized (i.e., the timeline of test-cases is naturally split). iFixR generates genuine/plausible patches for 21/44 Defects4J faults with its IR-based fault localizer. iFixR accurately places a genuine/plausible patch among its top-5 recommendation for 8/13 of these faults (without using future test cases in generation-and-validation).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationESEC/FSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
EditorsSven Apel, Marlon Dumas, Alessandra Russo, Dietmar Pfahl
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages314-325
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450355728
DOIs
StatePublished - 12 Aug 2019
Event27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2019 - Tallinn, Estonia
Duration: 26 Aug 201930 Aug 2019

Publication series

NameESEC/FSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Conference

Conference27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2019
Country/TerritoryEstonia
CityTallinn
Period26/08/1930/08/19

Keywords

  • Automatic patch generation
  • Fault localization
  • Information retrieval

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'IFixR: Bug report driven program repair'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this