# iFixR: Bug Report driven Program Repair

## TL;DR

iFixR is a novel bug report-driven program repair approach that leverages bug reports and fix patterns to generate and prioritize patches, addressing limitations of test suite-based methods.

## Contribution

The paper introduces iFixR, a new repair pipeline that uses bug reports and IR-based fault localization, expanding automated repair beyond test suite reliance.

## Key findings

- iFixR generates genuine patches for 21 out of 44 faults.
- It ranks a correct patch in the top-5 for 8 out of 13 faults.
- The approach does not depend on future test cases for validation.

## Abstract

Issue tracking systems are commonly used in modern software development for collecting feedback from users and developers. An ultimate automation target of software maintenance is then the systematization of patch generation for user-reported bugs. Although this ambition is aligned with the momentum of automated program repair, the literature has, so far, mostly focused on generate-and-validate setups where fault localization and patch generation are driven by a well-defined test suite. On the one hand, however, the common (yet strong) assumption on the existence of relevant test cases does not hold in practice for most development settings: many bugs are reported without the available test suite being able to reveal them. On the other hand, for many projects, the number of bug reports generally outstrips the resources available to triage them. Towards increasing the adoption of patch generation tools by practitioners, we investigate a new repair pipeline, iFixR, driven by bug reports: (1) bug reports are fed to an IR-based fault localizer; (2) patches are generated from fix patterns and validated via regression testing; (3) a prioritized list of generated patches is proposed to developers. We evaluate iFixR on the Defects4J dataset, which we enriched (i.e., faults are linked to bug reports) and carefully-reorganized (i.e., the timeline of test-cases is naturally split). iFixR generates genuine/plausible patches for 21/44 Defects4J faults with its IR-based fault localizer. iFixR accurately places a genuine/plausible patch among its top-5 recommendation for 8/13 of these faults (without using future test cases in generation-and-validation).