FrameFix: Automatically Repairing Statically-Detected Directive Violations in Framework Applications
Zack Coker, Joshua Sunshine, Claire Le Goues · 2021
Software frameworks make developing applications for a specific domain easier than doing so from scratch. Unfortunately, frameworks can also place unexpected requirements on a developer's application, which can, in turn, lead to application bugs in the development process. We propose an automated technique for repairing violations of state-based framework requirements, FrameFix. First, developers of a framework can encode state-based framework requirements. Then, FrameFix automatically checks whether a developer's application follows the encoded requirements. Once a violation of these requirements has been detected, FrameFix tries three different approaches - reordering method calls, moving method calls to different method definitions, and comparing the faulty method to similarly defined methods on GitHub. These repair approaches are based on the principles of how frameworks interact with framework applications: object protocols and inversion of control. To demonstrate that these principles can be used to aid automated repair for framework applications, we created a sample implementation of FrameFix for Android applications. Our evaluation shows that FrameFix is effective, repairing both real bugs in real applications, and a large number and variety of injected defects.