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Towards reusing hints from past fixes

An exploratory study on thousands of real samples

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Empirical Software Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

With the usage of version control systems, many bug fixes have accumulated over the years. Researchers have proposed various automatic program repair (APR) approaches that reuse past fixes to fix new bugs. However, some fundamental questions, such as how new fixes overlap with old fixes, have not been investigated. Intuitively, the overlap between old and new fixes decides how APR approaches can construct new fixes with old ones. Based on this intuition, we systematically designed six overlap metrics, and performed an empirical study on 5,735 bug fixes to investigate the usefulness of past fixes when composing new fixes. For each bug fix, we created delta graphs (i.e., program dependency graphs for code changes), and identified how bug fixes overlap with each other in terms of the content, code structures, and identifier names of fixes. Our results show that if an APR approach knows all code name changes and composes new fixes by fully or partially reusing the content of past fixes, only 2.1% and 3.2% new fixes can be created from single or multiple past fixes in the same project, compared with 0.9% and 1.2% fixes created from past fixes across projects. However, if an APR approach knows all code name changes and composes new fixes by fully or partially reusing the code structures of past fixes, up to 41.3% and 29.7% new fixes can be created. By making the above observations and revealing other ten findings, we investigated the upper bound of reusable past fixes and composable new fixes, exploring the potential of existing and future APR approaches.

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Notes

  1. http://wala.sourceforge.net

  2. https://github.com/Sable/soot

  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAiVsbXVP6k

  4. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-1157

  5. http://www.apache.org/

  6. http://db.apache.org/derby/derby_downloads.html

  7. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-1510. To save space, in the rest of the paper, we present only ids of fixes, but do not present their urls. All the fixes come from Apache, and their urls can be generated by replacing the id in the above url.

  8. http://wala.sourceforge.net/javadocs/trunk/

  9. PI is more restricted than PS and PN, but not the combination of the two. As a result, Column PI is not the sum of Columns PS and PN.

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Acknowledgements

Hao Zhong is sponsored by the 973 Program in China (No. 2015CB352203), the National Nature Science Foundation of China No. 61572313, and the grant of Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality No. 15DZ1100305. Na Meng is sponsored by the NSF CCF No. 1565827 and ONR-450487.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Hao Zhong

  2. Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Na Meng

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  1. Hao Zhong
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  2. Na Meng
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Correspondence to Hao Zhong.

Additional information

Communicated by: Sunghun Kim

This paper is an extended version of a poster paper (Zhong and Meng 2017) that is presented in the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2017.

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Zhong, H., Meng, N. Towards reusing hints from past fixes. Empir Software Eng 23, 2521–2549 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9584-3

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