Fast and Precise On-the-Fly Patch Validation for All

Generate-and-validate (G&V) automated program repair (APR) techniques have been extensively studied during the past decade. Meanwhile, such techniques can be extremely time-consuming due to the manipulation of program code to fabricate a large number of patches and also the repeated test executi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 1123 - 1134
Main Authors: Chen, Lingchao, Ouyang, Yicheng, Zhang, Lingming
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.05.2021
Subjects:
Computer bugs
Maintenance engineering
Runtime
ISBN:1665402962, 9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Generate-and-validate (G&V) automated program repair (APR) techniques have been extensively studied during the past decade. Meanwhile, such techniques can be extremely time-consuming due to the manipulation of program code to fabricate a large number of patches and also the repeated test executions on patches to identify potential fixes. PraPR, a recentG furthermore, UniAPR addresses the imprecise patch validation issue by resetting the JVM global state via runtime bytecode transformation. We have implemented UniAPR as a publicly available fully automated Maven Plugin. Our study demonstrates for the first time that on-the-fly patch validation can often speed up state-of-the-art source-code-level APR by over an order of magnitude, enabling all existing APR techniques to explore a larger search space to fix more bugs in the near future. Furthermore, our study shows the first empirical evidence that vanilla on-the-fly patch validation can be imprecise/unsound, while UniAPR with JVM reset is able to mitigate such issues with negligible overhead.
ISBN:1665402962
9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00104