Automated Program Repair by Using Similar Code Containing Fix Ingredients

Abstract

Recently, much attention has been paid on program repair by reusing existing code from other software. However, the technique of reusing code needs to search fix ingredients which refer to the existing code that can be reused to form a fix, and the searching space tends to be huge. Finding out those code fragments that contain proper fix ingredients efficiently will largely improve repair efficiency. Based on the assumption that similar code fragments may contain fix ingredients, this paper proposes reusability metrics of similar code fragments for program repair. By combining the similarity and differentiality at the level of program syntax trees, reusablility metrics is able to help picking out the most suitable reusable candidate. In order to apply reusability metrics to automated program repair, we have implemented SCRepair, which can utilize the guidance of reusability metrics to automatically fix bugs. Experimental results indicate that SCRepair can improve repair efficiency by making use of the reusability metrics of similar code.