How to Explain a Patch: An Empirical Study of Patch Explanations in Open Source Projects

2019 IEEE 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 DOI:10.1109/ISSRE.2019.00016

Jingjing Liang, Yaozong Hou, Shurui Zhou, Junjie Chen, Y. Xiong, Gang Huang

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引用次数: 5

Abstract

Abstract-Bugs are inevitable in software development and maintenance processes. Recently a lot of research efforts have been devoted to automatic program repair, aiming to reduce the efforts of debugging. However, since it is difficult to ensure that the generated patches meet all quality requirements such as correctness, developers still need to review the patch. In addition, current techniques produce only patches without explanation, making it difficult for the developers to understand the patch. Therefore, we believe a more desirable approach should generate not only the patch but also an explanation of the patch. To generate a patch explanation, it is important to first understand how patches were explained. In this paper, we explored how developers explain their patches by manually analyzing 300 merged bug-fixing pull requests from six projects on GitHub. Our contribution is twofold. First, we build a patch explanation model, which summarizes the elements in a patch explanation, and corresponding expressive forms. Second, we conducted a quantitative analysis to understand the distributions of elements, and the correlation between elements and their expressive forms.

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如何解释补丁:开源项目中补丁解释的实证研究

在软件开发和维护过程中，bug是不可避免的。为了减少调试的工作量，近年来人们对程序自动修复进行了大量的研究。然而，由于很难确保生成的补丁满足所有的质量要求，例如正确性，开发人员仍然需要审查补丁。此外，目前的技术只产生没有解释的补丁，这使得开发人员很难理解补丁。因此，我们认为更理想的方法不仅应该生成补丁，还应该生成补丁的解释。要生成补丁解释，首先要了解补丁是如何解释的。在本文中，我们探讨了开发人员如何通过手工分析来自GitHub上六个项目的300个合并的bug修复拉取请求来解释他们的补丁。我们的贡献是双重的。首先，我们建立了一个补丁解释模型，总结了补丁解释的要素，以及相应的表达形式。其次，我们进行了定量分析，了解元素的分布，以及元素与表现形式之间的相关性。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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2019 IEEE 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)

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