Partitioning Patches into Test-equivalence Classes for Scaling Program Repair
Sergey Mechtaev, Xiang Gao, Shin Hwei Tan, Abhik Roychoudhury

TL;DR
This paper introduces a test-equivalence based methodology for program repair that significantly reduces test executions, improving scalability and efficiency without compromising patch quality.
Contribution
It proposes a novel on-the-fly patch partitioning algorithm using test-equivalence relations, enhancing the scalability of automated program repair.
Findings
Reduces test executions by an order of magnitude
Maintains patch quality while improving efficiency
Effective on real-world programs
Abstract
Automated program repair is a problem of finding a transformation (called a patch) of a given incorrect program that eliminates the observable failures. It has important applications such as providing debugging aids, automatically grading assignments and patching security vulnerabilities. A common challenge faced by all existing repair techniques is scalability to large patch spaces, since there are many candidate patches that these techniques explicitly or implicitly consider. The correctness criterion for program repair is often given as a suite of tests, since a formal specification of the intended program behavior may not be available. Current repair techniques do not scale due to the large number of test executions performed by the underlying search algorithms. We address this problem by introducing a methodology of patch generation based on a test-equivalence relation (if two…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Testing and Debugging Techniques · Software Reliability and Analysis Research · Software Engineering Research
