Attention Please: Consider Mockito when Evaluating Newly Proposed Automated Program Repair Techniques

TL;DR

This paper investigates the importance of including Mockito bugs in the evaluation of automated program repair techniques, revealing that current tools perform poorly on these bugs and suggesting the need for broader evaluation benchmarks.

Contribution

It highlights the necessity of considering Mockito bugs in APR evaluations and proposes external package addition as a new repair action to improve techniques.

Findings

Mockito bugs are not more complex than other bugs

State-of-the-art tools perform poorly on Mockito bugs

External package addition is a key repair action for Mockito bugs

Abstract

Automated program repair (APR) has attracted widespread attention in recent years with substantial techniques being proposed. Meanwhile, a number of benchmarks have been established for evaluating the performances of APR techniques, among which Defects4J is one of the most wildly used benchmark. However, bugs in Mockito, a project augmented in a later-version of Defects4J, do not receive much attention by recent researches. In this paper, we aim at investigating the necessity of considering Mockito bugs when evaluating APR techniques. Our findings show that: 1) Mockito bugs are not more complex for repairing compared with bugs from other projects; 2) the bugs repaired by the state-of-the-art tools share the same repair patterns compared with those patterns required to repair Mockito bugs; however, 3) the state-of-the-art tools perform poorly on Mockito bugs (Nopol can only correctly fix one bug while SimFix and CapGen cannot fix any bug in Mockito even if all the buggy locations have been exposed). We conclude from these results that existing APR techniques may be overfitting to their evaluated subjects and we should consider Mockito, or even more bugs from other projects, when evaluating newly proposed APR techniques. We further find out a unique repair action required to repair Mockito bugs named external package addition. Importing the external packages from the test code associated with the source code is feasible for enlarging the search space and this action can be augmented with existing repair actions to advance existing techniques.