research-article

On the automation of fixing software bugs

Author:

Andrea ArcuriAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE Companion '08: Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering

Pages 1003 - 1006

https://doi.org/10.1145/1370175.1370223

Published: 10 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Software Testing can take up to half of the resources of the development of new software. Although there has been a lot of work on automating the testing phase, fixing a bug after its presence has been discovered is still a duty of the programmers. Techniques to help the software developers for locating bugs exist though, and they take name of Automated Debugging. However, to our best knowledge, there has been only little attempt in the past to completely automate the actual changing of the software for fixing the bugs. Therefore, in this paper we propose an evolutionary approach to automate the task of fixing bugs. The basic idea is to evolve the programs (e.g., by using Genetic Programming) with a fitness function that is based on how many unit tests they are able to pass. If a formal specification of the buggy software is given, more sophisticated fitness functions can be designed. Moreover, by using the formal specification as an oracle, we can generate as many unit tests as we want. Hence, a co-evolution between programs and unit tests might take place to give even better results. It is important to know that, to fix the bugs in a program with this novel approach, a user needs only to provide either a formal specification or a set of unit tests. No other information is required.

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661210
Endres MFakhoury SChakraborty SLahiri S(2024)Can Large Language Models Transform Natural Language Intent into Formal Method Postconditions?Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36607911:FSE(1889-1912)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
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Xie LLi CPei YZhang TPan MChristakis MPradel M(2024)BRAFAR: Bidirectional Refactoring, Alignment, Fault Localization, and Repair for Programming AssignmentsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3680326(856-868)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3680326
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On the automation of fixing software bugs

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE Companion '08: Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering

May 2008

214 pages

ISBN:9781605580791

DOI:10.1145/1370175

General Chair:
Wilhelm Schäfer
University of Paderborn
,
Program Chairs:
Matthew B. Dwyer
University of Nebraska
,
Volker Gruhn
University of Leipzig

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Published: 10 May 2008

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May 10 - 18, 2008

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661210
Endres MFakhoury SChakraborty SLahiri S(2024)Can Large Language Models Transform Natural Language Intent into Formal Method Postconditions?Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36607911:FSE(1889-1912)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
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Xie LLi CPei YZhang TPan MChristakis MPradel M(2024)BRAFAR: Bidirectional Refactoring, Alignment, Fault Localization, and Repair for Programming AssignmentsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3680326(856-868)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3680326
Xie LLi CPei YZhang TPan MHuyen PTan SMechtaev SKhurshid S(2024)Automated Program Repair for Introductory Programming Assignments via Bidirectional RefactoringProceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Automated Program Repair10.1145/3643788.3648017(53-55)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2024
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Valle PArrieta AArratibel M(2023)Automated Misconfiguration Repair of Configurable Cyber-Physical Systems with Search: an Industrial Case Study on Elevator Dispatching Algorithms2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)10.1109/ICSE-SEIP58684.2023.00042(396-408)Online publication date: May-2023
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