Skip to main content
Article
Empirical study on synthesis engines for semantics-based program repair
2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution: ICSME 2016: 2-10 October 2016, Raleigh: Proceedings
  • Le Dinh Xuan BACH
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Claire Le GOUES
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2016
Abstract

Automatic Program Repair (APR) is an emerging and rapidly growing research area, with many techniques proposed to repair defective software. One notable state-of-the-art line of APR approaches is known as semantics-based techniques, e.g., Angelix, which extract semantics constraints, i.e., specifications, via symbolic execution and test suites, and then generate repairs conforming to these constraints using program synthesis. The repair capability of such approaches-expressive power, output quality, and scalability-naturally depends on the underlying synthesis technique. However, despite recent advances in program synthesis, not much attention has been paid to assess, compare, or leverage the variety of available synthesis engine capabilities in an APR context. In this paper, we empirically compare the effectiveness of different synthesis engines for program repair. We do this by implementing a framework on top of the latest semantics-based APR technique, Angelix, that allows us to use different such engines. For this preliminary study, we use a subset of bugs in the IntroClass benchmark, a dataset of many small programs recently proposed for use in evaluating APR techniques, with a focus on assessing output quality. Our initial findings suggest that different synthesis engines have their own strengths and weaknesses, and future work on semantics-based APR should explore innovative ways to exploit and combine multiple synthesis engines.

Keywords
  • Empirical Study,
  • Automated Program Repair,
  • Program Synthesis Engines,
  • computer bugs,
  • benchmark testing
ISBN
9781509038060
Identifier
10.1109/ICSME.2016.68
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2016.68
Citation Information
Le Dinh Xuan BACH, David LO and Claire Le GOUES. "Empirical study on synthesis engines for semantics-based program repair" 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution: ICSME 2016: 2-10 October 2016, Raleigh: Proceedings (2016)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/250/