Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/30381
Title: Expanding Fix Patterns to Enable Automatic Program Repair
Authors: Nowack, V
Bowes, D
Counsell, S
Hall, T
Haraldsson, S
Winter, E
Woodward, J
Keywords: automatic program repair;similarity metric;clustering;fix pattern
Issue Date: 25-Oct-2021
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation: Nowack, V. et al. (2021) 'Expanding Fix Patterns to Enable Automatic Program Repair', 2021 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), Wuhan, China (virtual), 25-28 October, pp. 12 - 23. doi: 10.1109/ISSRE52982.2021.00015.
Abstract: Automatic Program Repair (APR) has been proposed to help developers and reduce the time spent repairing programs. Recent APR tools have applied learned templates (fix patterns) to fix code using knowledge from fixes successfully applied in the past. However, there is still no general agreement on the representation of fix patterns, making their application and comparison with a baseline difficult. As a consequence, it is also difficult to expand fix patterns and further enable APR. We automatically generate fix patterns from similar fixes and compare the generated fix patterns against a state-of-the-art taxonomy. Our automated approach splits fixes into smaller, method-level chunks and calculates their similarity. A threshold-based clustering algorithm groups similar chunks and finds matches with state-of-the-art fix patterns. In our evaluation, we present 33 clusters whose fix patterns were generated from the fixes of 835 Defects4J bugs. Of those 33 clusters, 22 matched a state-of-the-art taxonomy with good agreement. The remaining 11 clusters were thematically analysed and generated new fix patterns that expanded the taxonomy. Our new fix patterns should enable APR researchers and practitioners to expand their tools to fix a greater range of bugs in the future.
URI: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/30381
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE52982.2021.00015
ISBN: 978-1-6654-2587-2 (ebk)
ISSN: 1071-9458
978-1-6654-2588-9 (PoD)
Other Identifiers: ORCiD: Vesna Nowack https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6524-9179
ORCiD: David Bowes https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7014-2811
ORCiD: Steve Counsell https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2939-8919
ORCiD: Tracy Hall https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2728-9014
ORCiD: Sæmundur Haraldsson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0395-5884
ORCiD: Emily Rowan Winter https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3314-7300
Appears in Collections:Dept of Computer Science Research Papers

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