SemFix: program repair via semantic analysis

• Published in: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 772 - 781
• Main Authors: Nguyen, Hoang Duong Thien, Qi, Dawei, Roychoudhury, Abhik, Chandra, Satish
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway, NJ, USA IEEE Press 18.05.2013
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Program analysis; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program semantics
• ISBN: 1467330760; 9781467330763
• DOI: 10.5555/2486788.2486890

Debugging consumes significant time and effort in any major software development project. Moreover, even after the root cause of a bug is identified, fixing the bug is non-trivial. Given this situation, automated program repair methods are of value. In this paper, we present an automated repair method based on symbolic execution, constraint solving and program synthesis. In our approach, the requirement on the repaired code to pass a given set of tests is formulated as a constraint. Such a constraint is then solved by iterating over a layered space of repair expressions, layered by the complexity of the repair code. We compare our method with recently proposed genetic programming based repair on SIR programs with seeded bugs, as well as fragments of GNU Coreutils with real bugs. On these subjects, our approach reports a higher success-rate than genetic programming based repair, and produces a repair faster.