A human study of patch maintainability

Identifying and fixing defects is a crucial and expensive part of the software lifecycle. Measuring the quality of bug-fixing patches is a difficult task that affects both functional correctness and the future maintainability of the code base. Recent research interest in automatic patch generation makes a systematic understanding of patch maintainability and understandability even more critical.

We present a human study involving over 150 participants, 32 real-world defects, and 40 distinct patches. In the study, humans perform tasks that demonstrate their understanding of the control flow, state, and maintainability aspects of code patches. As a baseline we use both human-written patches that were later reverted and also patches that have stood the test of time to ground our results. To address any potential lack of readability with machine-generated patches, we propose a system wherein such patches are augmented with synthesized, human-readable documentation that summarizes their effects and context. Our results show that machine-generated patches are slightly less maintainable than human-written ones, but that trend reverses when machine patches are augmented with our synthesized documentation. Finally, we examine the relationship between code features (such as the ratio of variable uses to assignments) with participants' abilities to complete the study tasks and thus explain a portion of the broad concept of patch quality.