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Automatically finding patches using genetic programming
Abstract
Automatic program repair has been a longstanding goal in software engineering, yet debugging remains a largely manual process. We introduce a fully automated method for locating and repairing bugs in software. The approach works on off-the-shelf legacy applications and does not require formal specifications, program annotations or special coding practices. Once a program fault is discovered, an extended form of genetic programming is used to evolve program variants until one is found that both retains required functionality and also avoids the defect in question. Standard test cases are used to exercise the fault and to encode program requirements. After a successful repair has been discovered, it is minimized using structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging. We describe the proposed method and report experimental results demonstrating that it can successfully repair ten different C programs totaling 63,000 lines in under 200 seconds, on average.
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Cited by
An analysis of patch plausibility and correctness for generate-and-validate patch generation systems
Qi, Z., Long, F., Achour, S., & Rinard, M. (2015) · Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis · doi:10.1145/2771783.2771791 · Cited by 420
Le Goues, C., Pradel, M., & Roychoudhury, A. (2019) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/3318162 · Cited by 410
An Empirical Study on Learning Bug-Fixing Patches in the Wild via Neural Machine Translation
Tufano, M., Watson, C., Bavota, G., Penta, M. D., White, M., & Poshyvanyk, D. (2019) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/3340544 · Cited by 370
The ManyBugs and IntroClass benchmarks for automated repair of C programs
Le Goues, C., Holtschulte, N., Smith, E. K., Brun, Y., Devanbu, P., Forrest, S., & Weimer, W. (2015) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2015.2454513 · Cited by 326
Self-citationShaping program repair space with existing patches and similar code
Jiang, J., Xiong, Y., Zhang, H., Gao, Q., & Chen, X. (2018) · Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis · doi:10.1145/3213846.3213871 · Cited by 329
Metadata
- Authors
- Weimer, W., Nguyen, T., Le Goues, C., & Forrest, S.
- Venue
- 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2009
- Pages
- 364-374
- OpenAlex
- W2122947685
- Cited by
- 761
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 25.74
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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