Abstract
With the usage of version control systems, many bug fixes have accumulated over the years. Researchers have proposed various approaches that reuse past fixes to fix new bugs. However, some fundamental questions, such as how new bug fixes can be constructed from old fixes, have not been investigated. When an approach reuses past fixes to fix a new bug, the new bug fix should overlap with past fixes in terms of code structures and/or code names. Based on this intuition, we systematically design six overlap metrics, and conduct an empirical study on 5,735 bug fixes to investigate the usefulness of past fixes. For each bug fix, we create delta dependency graphs, and identify how bug fixes overlap with each other by detecting isomorphic subgraphs. Our results show Besides that above two major findings, we have additional ten findings, which can deepen the understanding on automatic program repair.
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