Obstacles in Fully Automatic Program Repair: A survey

TL;DR

This survey analyzes the challenges in fully automatic program repair, highlighting the overfitting obstacle and proposing a shift in approach to achieve complete automation.

Contribution

It provides an interdisciplinary review of automatic program repair, identifies key obstacles like overfitting, and suggests new directions for fully automating the repair process.

Findings

Overfitting is a major obstacle in automatic repair.

Current approaches lack full automation.

A shift in methodology is needed for complete automation.

Abstract

The current article is an interdisciplinary attempt to decipher automatic program repair processes. The review is done by the manner typical to human science known as diffraction. We attempt to spot a gap in the literature of self-healing and self-repair operations and further investigate the approaches that would enable us to tackle the problems we face. As a conclusion, we suggest a shift in the current approach to automatic program repair operations in order to attain our goals. The emphasis of this review is to achieve full automation. Several obstacles are shortly mentioned in the current essay but the main shortage that is covered is the overfitting obstacle, and this particular problem is investigated in the stream that is related to full automation of the repair process.