GenProg: A Generic Method for Automatic Software Repair

This paper describes GenProg, an automated method for repairing defects in off-the-shelf, legacy programs without formal specifications, program annotations, or special coding practices. GenProg uses an extended form of genetic programming to evolve a program variant that retains required functional...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering Vol. 38; no. 1; pp. 54 - 72
Main Authors: Le Goues, Claire, Nguyen, ThanhVu, Forrest, Stephanie, Weimer, Westley
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2012
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects:
Algorithms
Analysis
Automatic programming
Automation
Benchmarks
Coding
Computer bugs
Computer programming
Computer programs
Computer science
Computers
corrections
Debugging
Defects
Degradation
Digital Object Identifier
Encoding
Maintenance
Maintenance engineering
Repair
Software
Software engineering
Software quality
Studies
Success
Syntactics
Testing
testing and debugging
ISSN:0098-5589, 1939-3520
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper describes GenProg, an automated method for repairing defects in off-the-shelf, legacy programs without formal specifications, program annotations, or special coding practices. GenProg uses an extended form of genetic programming to evolve a program variant that retains required functionality but is not susceptible to a given defect, using existing test suites to encode both the defect and required functionality. Structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging reduce the difference between this variant and the original program to a minimal repair. We describe the algorithm and report experimental results of its success on 16 programs totaling 1.25 M lines of C code and 120K lines of module code, spanning eight classes of defects, in 357 seconds, on average. We analyze the generated repairs qualitatively and quantitatively to demonstrate that the process efficiently produces evolved programs that repair the defect, are not fragile input memorizations, and do not lead to serious degradation in functionality.
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ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2011.104