Exploiting fault localisation for efficient program repair
Vesna Nowack, David Bowes, Steve Counsell, Tracy Hall, Saemundur Oskar Haraldsson, Emily Winter, John Robert Woodward · 2020
Search-based program repair generates variants of a defective program to find its repair. This could reduce the time and effort necessary for the manual software development and maintenance. However, applying even a limited set of mutations on a small piece of code (that repairs only trivial defects) generates a huge number of possible program variants (also called a search space). The reduction of the search space, while preserving the number and quality of repairs, would make these tools more efficient and practical.