Production-Driven Patch Generation and Validation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Itzal, a novel system for generating and validating patches directly in production environments, demonstrated through empirical experiments on real-world Java applications with uncaught exceptions.

Contribution

Itzal is the first system to perform production-driven patch generation and validation for Java applications, enabling real-time fixes for production failures.

Findings

Validated on 34 real failures across 14 applications

Successfully repaired 16 seeded failures in open-source e-commerce apps

Demonstrated feasibility of production-driven program repair

Abstract

We envision a world where the developer would receive each morning in her GitHub dashboard a list of potential patches that fix certain production failures. For this, we propose a novel program repair scheme, with the unique feature of being applicable to production directly. We present the design and implementation of a prototype system for Java, called Itzal, that performs patch generation for uncaught exceptions in production. We have performed two empirical experiments to validate our system: the first one on 34 failures from 14 different software applications, the second one on 16 seeded failures in 3 real open-source e-commerce applications for which we have set up a realistic user traffic. This validates the novel and disruptive idea of using program repair directly in production.