The Impact of Program Reduction on Automated Program Repair

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Vidziunas, Linas, Binkley, David, Moonen, Leon
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Vidziunas, Linas
Binkley, David
Moonen, Leon
author_facet Vidziunas, Linas
Binkley, David
Moonen, Leon
contents 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. A replication package is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13074333. Keywords: automated program repair, dynamic program slicing, fault localization, test-suite reduction, hybrid techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_01134
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Impact of Program Reduction on Automated Program Repair
Vidziunas, Linas
Binkley, David
Moonen, Leon
Software Engineering
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. A replication package is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13074333. Keywords: automated program repair, dynamic program slicing, fault localization, test-suite reduction, hybrid techniques.
title The Impact of Program Reduction on Automated Program Repair
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01134