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Automatic repair of real bugs in java: a large-scale experiment on the defects4j dataset

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Abstract

Defects4J is a large, peer-reviewed, structured dataset of real-world Java bugs. Each bug in Defects4J comes with a test suite and at least one failing test case that triggers the bug. In this paper, we report on an experiment to explore the effectiveness of automatic test-suite based repair on Defects4J. The result of our experiment shows that the considered state-of-the-art repair methods can generate patches for 47 out of 224 bugs. However, those patches are only test-suite adequate, which means that they pass the test suite and may potentially be incorrect beyond the test-suite satisfaction correctness criterion. We have manually analyzed 84 different patches to assess their real correctness. In total, 9 real Java bugs can be correctly repaired with test-suite based repair. This analysis shows that test-suite based repair suffers from under-specified bugs, for which trivial or incorrect patches still pass the test suite. With respect to practical applicability, it takes on average 14.8 minutes to find a patch. The experiment was done on a scientific grid, totaling 17.6 days of computation time. All the repair systems and experimental results are publicly available on Github in order to facilitate future research on automatic repair.

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Notes

  1. 1 The dataset and the repair system in Kim et al. (2013) are not publicly available.

  2. 2 Apache Commons Lang, http://commons.apache.org/lang.

  3. 3 JFreeChart, http://jfree.org/jfreechart/.

  4. 4 Apache Commons Math, http://commons.apache.org/math.

  5. 5 Joda-Time, http://joda.org/joda-time/.

  6. 6 Google Closure Compiler, http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/.

  7. 7 Bug ID in the bug tracking system of Commons Math is Math-942, http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MATH-942.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (under grant 61502345).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Valenciennes, Campus Mont Houy - 59313, Valenciennes, France

    Matias Martinez

  2. Spirals team, University of Lille and Inria, 40 Avenue du Halley, 59650, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France

    Thomas Durieux, Romain Sommerard & Martin Monperrus

  3. State Key Lab of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, 299 Bayi Road, 430072, Wuhan, China

    Jifeng Xuan

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  1. Matias Martinez
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  2. Thomas Durieux
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matias Martinez.

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Communicated by: Sunghun Kim

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Martinez, M., Durieux, T., Sommerard, R. et al. Automatic repair of real bugs in java: a large-scale experiment on the defects4j dataset. Empir Software Eng 22, 1936–1964 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9470-4

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