Towards API-specific automatic program repair

Abstract

The domain of Automatic Program Repair (APR) had many research contributions in recent years. So far, most approaches target fixing generic bugs in programs (e.g., off-by-one errors). Nevertheless, recent studies reveal that about 50% of real bugs require API-specific fixes (e.g., adding missing API method calls or correcting method ordering), for which existing APR approaches are not designed. In this paper, we address this problem and introduce the notion of an API-specific program repair mechanism. This mechanism detects erroneous code in a similar way to existing APR approaches. However, to fix such bugs, it uses API-specific information from the erroneous code to search for API usage patterns in other software, with which we could fix the bug. We provide first insights on the applicability of this mechanism and discuss upcoming research challenges.