Anti-patterns for Java Automated Program Repair Tools

Abstract

Prior study has identified common anti-patterns in automated repair for C programs. In this work, we study if the same problems exist in Java programs. We performed a manual inspection on the plausible patches generated by Java automated repair tools. We integrated anti-patterns in jGenProg2 and evaluated on Defects4J benchmark. The result shows that the average repair time is reduced by 22.6 % and the number of generated plausible patches is reduced from 67 to 29 for 14 bugs in total. Our study provided evidence about the effectiveness of applying anti-patterns in future Java automated repair tools.