Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews automatic software repair methods across various research communities, detailing bug detection, repair techniques, and diverse oracles used in the field.

Contribution

It provides a structured overview of repair types, bug oracles, and techniques, integrating insights from multiple research communities.

Findings

Covers behavioral and state repair methods

Highlights diversity of bug oracles and repair operators

Bridges multiple research disciplines in software repair

Abstract

This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First, it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems, programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the literature.