How to design a program repair bot? insights from the repairnator project

Program repair research has made tremendous progress over the last few years, and software development bots are now being invented to help developers gain productivity. In this paper, we investigate the concept of a "program repair bot" and present Repairnator. The Repairnator bot is an au...

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Published in2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track (ICSE-SEIP) pp. 95 - 104
Main Authors Urli, Simon, Yu, Zhongxing, Seinturier, Lionel, Monperrus, Martin
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, NY, USA ACM 27.05.2018
SeriesACM Conferences
Subjects
Computer bugs
Java
Maintenance engineering
Open source software
program repair
repair bot
Software engineering
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Summary:Program repair research has made tremendous progress over the last few years, and software development bots are now being invented to help developers gain productivity. In this paper, we investigate the concept of a "program repair bot" and present Repairnator. The Repairnator bot is an autonomous agent that constantly monitors test failures, reproduces bugs, and runs program repair tools against each reproduced bug. If a patch is found, Repairnator bot reports it to the developers. At the time of writing, Repairnator uses three different program repair systems and has been operating since February 2017. In total, it has studied 11 523 test failures over 1 609 open-source software projects hosted on GitHub, and has generated patches for 15 different bugs. Over months, we hit a number of hard technical challenges and had to make various design and engineering decisions. This gives us a unique experience in this area. In this paper, we reflect upon Repairnator in order to share this knowledge with the automatic program repair community.
ISBN:9781450356596
1450356591
DOI:10.1145/3183519.3183540