Towards More Reliable Automated Program Repair by Integrating Static Analysis Techniques

TL;DR

This paper proposes integrating static analysis techniques with automated program repair to create stronger specifications, thereby improving repair quality and reducing search space for bugs like overflows and termination issues.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining static bug detection with repair systems, enhancing specification strength and guiding patch generation for specific bug classes.

Findings

Effective integration of static analysis improves repair accuracy.

Static analysis narrows down candidate patches significantly.

Observations aid in prioritizing patch search order.

Abstract

A long-standing open challenge for automated program repair is the overfitting problem, which is caused by having insufficient or incomplete specifications to validate whether a generated patch is correct or not. Most available repair systems rely on weak specifications (i.e., specifications that are synthesized from test cases) which limits the quality of generated repairs. To strengthen specifications and improve the quality of repairs, we propose to closer integrate static bug detection techniques with automated program repair. The integration combines automated program repair with static analysis techniques in such a way that bug detection patterns can be synthesized into specifications that the repair system can use. We explore the feasibility of such integration using two types of bugs: arithmetic bugs, such as integer overflow, and logical bugs, such as termination bugs. As part of our analysis, we make several observations that help to improve patch generation for these classes of bugs. Moreover, these observations assist with narrowing down the candidate patch search space, and inferring an effective search order.