New Strategies for Selecting Reuse Candidates on Automated Program Repair

Automated program repair (in short, APR) is a truly desired technique because it can reduce debugging costs drastically. A well-known technique in APR is a reuse-based approach, which inserts existing program statements in a given program to suspicious code for an exposed bug. Some reports show the reuse-based approach was able to fix many bugs in open source software. However, the existing approach often takes very long time to fix bugs. Its main factor is that so many variant programs are generated by insertions and so many test cases are executed for the variant programs before a fixed program is generated. In order to shorten fixing time with the reuse-based approach, a fixed program must be generated much more efficiently. In this paper, we propose two strategies to generate a fixed program more efficiently. We also implement the two strategies and confirm that there are real bugs which the two strategies contribute to shortening fixing time.