Advances in recent years have made it possible in some cases to locate bugs automatically. But debugging is also about correcting bugs. Can tools do this automatically? The results reported in this paper, from the new PACHIKA tool, suggest that such a goal may be reachable. PACHIKA leverages differences in program behavior to generate program fixes directly. It automatically infers object behavior models from executions, determines differences between passing and failing runs, generates possible fixes, and assesses them via the regression test suite. Evaluated on the ASPECTJ bug history, PACHIKA generates a valid fix for 3 out of 18 crashing bugs; every fix pinpoints the bug location and passes the ASPECTJ test suite.
PACHIKA REF leverages object behavior models.
Generating Fixes from Object Behavior Anomalies
2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Computer Science