Towards a Benchmark Set for Program Repair Based on Partial Fixes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a benchmark dataset of 2204 tasks derived from partial fixes in open-source C repositories, aiming to explore their relevance for advancing automated program repair.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale benchmark set based on partial fixes, facilitating research on leveraging partial fix information in automated program repair.

Findings

Partial fixes occur frequently enough to be relevant for research.

The benchmark set is publicly available for further study.

Partial fixes contain valuable information for bug localization.

Abstract

Software bugs significantly contribute to software cost and increase the risk of system malfunctioning. In recent years, many automated program-repair approaches have been proposed to automatically fix undesired program behavior. Despite of their great success, specific problems such as fixing bugs with partial fixes still remain unresolved. A partial fix to a known software issue is a programmer's failed attempt to fix the issue the first time. Even though it fails, this fix attempt still conveys important information such as the suspicious software region and the bug type. In this work we do not propose an approach for program repair with partial fixes, but instead answer a preliminary question: Do partial fixes occur often enough, in general, to be relevant for the research area of automated program repair? We crawled 1500 open-source C repositories on GitHub for partial fixes. The result is a benchmark set of 2204 benchmark tasks for automated program repair based on partial fixes. The benchmark set is available open source and open to further contributions and improvement.