What Can Program Repair Learn From Code Review?

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, research on automated program repair has matured, and transitions to industry have begun. However, an impediment to wider adoption is concern over automatically gen-erated patch correctness. A review of 250 program repair research papers suggests that this concern can be addressed by adapting practices from modern code review, such as multiple anonymized reviews and checklists with well-defined terminology, to better evaluate the correctness and acceptability of plausible patches. In this paper, we argue that adopting such practices from modern code review for automated program repair research can increase developer trust, paving the way for wider industrial deployments.