Section: New Results

Automated Software Repair with Patch Generation in Production

In 2018, in the domain of automated software repair, we proposed new patch generation techniques. Patch creation is one of the most important actions in the life cycle of an application. Creating patches is a time-consuming task. Not only because it is difficult to create a sound and valid patch, but also because it requires the intervention of humans. Our work proposes new patch generation techniques that remove the human intervention. Our idea is to put as close as possible the patch generation in the production environment. We adopt this approach because the production environment contains all the data and human interactions that lead to the bug. We show how to exploit this data to detect bugs, generate and validate patches. We evaluate this approach on seven different benchmarks of real bugs collected from open-source projects. During the evaluation, we are particularly attentive to the number of generated patches, to their correctness, readability and to the time required for generating them. Our evaluation shows the applicability and feasibility of our approach to generate patches in the production environment without the intervention of a developer. These results have been obtained in the context of the PhD thesis of Thomas Durieux [11] defended in September 2018.