PROPR: Property-Based Automatic Program Repair

Automatic program repair (APR) regularly faces the challenge of overfitting patches - patches that pass the test suite, but do not actually address the problems when evaluated manually. Currently, overfit detection requires manual inspection or an oracle making quality control of APR an expensive ta...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) Vol. 2022-May; pp. 1768 - 1780
Main Authors: Gissurarson, Matthias Pall, Applis, Leonhard, Panichella, Annibale, van Deursen, Arie, Sands, David
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 01.05.2022
Subjects:
automatic program repair
Inspection
Location awareness
Maintenance engineering
Manuals
Program processors
property-based testing
Redundancy
search based software engineering
Software
synthesis
typed holes
ISSN:0270-5257, 1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Automatic program repair (APR) regularly faces the challenge of overfitting patches - patches that pass the test suite, but do not actually address the problems when evaluated manually. Currently, overfit detection requires manual inspection or an oracle making quality control of APR an expensive task. With this work, we want to introduce properties in addition to unit tests for APR to address the problem of overfitting. To that end, we design and implement PROPR, a program repair tool for Haskell that leverages both property-based testing (via QuickCheck) and the rich type sys-tem and synthesis offered by the Haskell compiler. We compare the repair-ratio, time-to-first-patch and overfitting-ratio when using unit tests, property-based tests, and their combination. Our results show that properties lead to quicker results and have a lower overfit ratio than unit tests. The created overfit patches provide valuable insight into the underlying problems of the program to repair (e.g., in terms of fault localization or test quality). We consider this step towards fitter, or at least insightful, patches a critical contribution to bring APR into developer workflows.
ISSN:0270-5257
1558-1225
DOI:10.1145/3510003.3510620