RepChaBug: Automatically Repairing Incorrect Change Bugs in Software Evolution
Jun Wang, Samuel Sungmin Cho, Myoungkyu Song · 2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) · 2022
Software systems become inevitable to have bugs due to the change complexity in a large portion of code. Program repair is a critical maintenance task in software evolution. To reduce maintenance effort and time, the technique of copying and pasting code snippets (code clone) is generally practiced by both the novice and large parts of the developer community. Debugging errors on such replication changes is an effort-prone and time-consuming task. To address this problem, we present an automated program repair approach, called REPCHABUG that helps developers find and repair code change anomalies when they mistakenly apply contradictory updates (contradiction bugs) or miss required edits (exclusion bugs) on code cloning activity. Given the code change portion, REPCHABUG generalizes the code modification into a dependency-aware change template by computing data and control dependency relationships. In our evaluation, a case study with open source applications and a user study with computer science students showed that REPCHABUG should improve developer productivity in finding and fixing replication change bugs.