research-article

A genetic programming approach to automated software repair

Authors:

Stephanie Forrest,

ThanhVu Nguyen,

Westley Weimer,

Claire Le GouesAuthors Info & Claims

GECCO '09: Proceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation

Pages 947 - 954

https://doi.org/10.1145/1569901.1570031

Published: 08 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Genetic programming is combined with program analysis methods to repair bugs in off-the-shelf legacy C programs. Fitness is defined using negative test cases that exercise the bug to be repaired and positive test cases that encode program requirements. Once a successful repair is discovered, structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging methods are used to minimize its size. Several modifications to the GP technique contribute to its success: (1) genetic operations are localized to the nodes along the execution path of the negative test case; (2) high-level statements are represented as single nodes in the program tree; (3) genetic operators use existing code in other parts of the program, so new code does not need to be invented. The paper describes the method, reviews earlier experiments that repaired 11 bugs in over 60,000 lines of code, reports results on new bug repairs, and describes experiments that analyze the performance and efficacy of the evolutionary components of the algorithm.

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Cited By

Gemeinhardt FKlikovits SWimmer M(2025)GeQuPI: Quantum Program Improvement with Multi-Objective Genetic ProgrammingJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112223219(112223)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112223
Liou JAwan MLeyba KŠulc PHofmeyr SWu CForrest S(2024)Evolving to Find Optimizations Humans Miss: Using Evolutionary Computation to Improve GPU Code for Bioinformatics ApplicationsACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization10.1145/37039204:4(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3703920
Song XWu YLiu SChen BLin YPeng XChristakis MPradel M(2024)C2D2: Extracting Critical Changes for Real-World Bugs with Dependency-Sensitive Delta DebuggingProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3652129(300-312)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3652129
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Index Terms

A genetic programming approach to automated software repair
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Error handling and recovery
    2. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Data structures design and analysis
      1. Sorting and searching

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cover image ACM Conferences

GECCO '09: Proceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation

July 2009

2036 pages

ISBN:9781605583259

DOI:10.1145/1569901

General Chair:
Franz Rothlauf
University of Mainz, Germany

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 July 2009

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GECCO09

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GECCO09: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference

July 8 - 12, 2009

Québec, Montreal, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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Cited By

Gemeinhardt FKlikovits SWimmer M(2025)GeQuPI: Quantum Program Improvement with Multi-Objective Genetic ProgrammingJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112223219(112223)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112223
Liou JAwan MLeyba KŠulc PHofmeyr SWu CForrest S(2024)Evolving to Find Optimizations Humans Miss: Using Evolutionary Computation to Improve GPU Code for Bioinformatics ApplicationsACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization10.1145/37039204:4(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3703920
Song XWu YLiu SChen BLin YPeng XChristakis MPradel M(2024)C2D2: Extracting Critical Changes for Real-World Bugs with Dependency-Sensitive Delta DebuggingProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3652129(300-312)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3652129
Yuan YHuyen PTan SMechtaev SKhurshid S(2024)ARJA-e for the First International Competition on Automated Program RepairProceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Automated Program Repair10.1145/3643788.3648019(50-52)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643788.3648019
Cao HGuo YWang YTian FWang ZChu YDeng MWang PHe ZWei S(2024)GMRepair: Graph Mining Template-based Automated Software RepairInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S0218194025500068Online publication date: 7-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194025500068
Bo LHe YSun XJi WWu X(2024)A Software Bug Fixing Approach Based on Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00026(169-179)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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Robati Shirzad MLam P(2024)A study of common bug fix patterns in RustEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10437-129:2Online publication date: 12-Feb-2024
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Yousofvand LSoleimani SRafe VEsfandyari S(2024)Automatic program bug fixing by focusing on finding the shortest sequence of changesArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-023-10686-y57:2Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
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VaraminyBahnemiry ZGalasso JOakes BSahraoui H(2024)Improving repair of semantic ATL errors using a social diversity metricSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-024-01170-423:6(1547-1568)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2024
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Wei YBo LWu XLi YYe ZSun XLi B(2023)VulRep: vulnerability repair based on inducing commits and fixing commitsEURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking10.1186/s13638-023-02242-72023:1Online publication date: 21-Apr-2023
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