Automatic program repair with evolutionary computation

Westley Weimer; Stephanie Forrest; Claire Le Goues; Thanhvu Nguyen

doi:10.1145/1735223.1735249

Automatic program repair with evolutionary computation

Westley Weimer, Stephanie Forrest, Claire Le Goues, Thanhvu Nguyen

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

137 Scopus citations

Abstract

There are many methods for detecting and mitigating software errors but few generic methods for automatically repairing errors once they are discovered. This paper highlights recent work combining program analysis methods with evolutionary computation to automatically repair bugs in off-the-shelf legacy C programs. The method takes as input the buggy C source code, a failed test case that demonstrates the bug, and a small number of other test cases that encode the required functionality of the program. The repair procedure does not rely on formal specifications, making it applicable to a wide range of extant software for which formal specifications rarely exist.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	109-116
Number of pages	8
Journal	Communications of the ACM
Volume	53
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/1735223.1735249
State	Published - May 1 2010
Externally published	Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science(all)

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10.1145/1735223.1735249

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AB - There are many methods for detecting and mitigating software errors but few generic methods for automatically repairing errors once they are discovered. This paper highlights recent work combining program analysis methods with evolutionary computation to automatically repair bugs in off-the-shelf legacy C programs. The method takes as input the buggy C source code, a failed test case that demonstrates the bug, and a small number of other test cases that encode the required functionality of the program. The repair procedure does not rely on formal specifications, making it applicable to a wide range of extant software for which formal specifications rarely exist.

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Automatic program repair with evolutionary computation

Abstract

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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