The Remarkable Role of Similarity in Redundancy-based Program Repair

11/14/2018

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by   Zimin Chen, et al.

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Recently, there have been original attempts to use the concept of similarity in program repair. Given that those works report impressive results in terms of repair effectiveness, it is clear that similarity has an important role in the repair process. However, there is no dedicated work to characterize and quantify the role of similarity in redundancy-based program repair. This is where our paper makes a major contribution, we perform a deep and systematic analysis of the role of similarity during the exploration of the repair search space. We show that with similarity analysis, only 0.65 (on average over 2766 bugs) must be explored before finding the correct patch. And it is capable of ranking the correct ingredient first in the most of the time (65