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R2Fix: Automatically Generating Bug Fixes from Bug Reports

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Liu_Chen.pdf (443.33 KB)

Date

2013-01-08T21:34:45Z

Authors

Liu, Chen

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Publisher

University of Waterloo

Abstract

Many bugs, even those that are known and documented in bug reports, remain in mature software for a long time due to the lack of the development resources to fix them. We propose a general approach, R2Fix, to automatically generate bug-fixing patches from free-form bug reports. R2Fix combines past fix patterns, machine learning techniques, and semantic patch generation techniques to fix bugs automatically. We evaluate R2Fix on three large and popular software projects, i.e., the Linux kernel, Mozilla, and Apache, for three important types of bugs: buffer overflows, null pointer bugs, and memory leaks. R2Fix generates 60 patches correctly, 5 of which are new patches for bugs that have not been fixed by developers yet. We reported all 5 new patches to the developers; 4 have already been accepted and committed to the code repositories. The 60 correct patches generated by R2Fix could have shortened and saved an average of 68 days of bug diagnosis and patch generation time.

Description

Keywords

Reliability, Bug report classification, Automatic bug fixing, Fault repair

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Citation

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10012/7187

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Theses
Electrical and Computer Engineering