Automated Fixing of Programs with Contracts

This paper describes AutoFix, an automatic debugging technique that can fix faults in general-purpose software. To provide high-quality fix suggestions and to enable automation of the whole debugging process, AutoFix relies on the presence of simple specification elements in the form of contracts (such as pre- and postconditions). Using contracts enhances the precision of dynamic analysis techniques for fault detection and localization, and for validating fixes. The only required user input to the AutoFix supporting tool is then a faulty program annotated with contracts; the tool produces a collection of validated fixes for the fault ranked according to an estimate of their suitability. In an extensive experimental evaluation, we applied AutoFix to over 200 faults in four code bases of different maturity and quality (of implementation and of contracts). AutoFix successfully fixed 42% of the faults, producing, in the majority of cases, corrections of quality comparable to those competent programmers would write; the used computational resources were modest, with an average time per fix below 20 minutes on commodity hardware. These figures compare favorably to the state of the art in automated program fixing, and demonstrate that the AutoFix approach is successfully applicable to reduce the debugging burden in real-world scenarios.Comment: Minor changes after proofreadin

Building an IDE for the Calculational Derivation of Imperative Programs

In this paper, we describe an IDE called CAPS (Calculational Assistant for Programming from Specifications) for the interactive, calculational derivation of imperative programs. In building CAPS, our aim has been to make the IDE accessible to non-experts while retaining the overall flavor of the pen-and-paper calculational style. We discuss the overall architecture of the CAPS system, the main features of the IDE, the GUI design, and the trade-offs involved.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Experiments with a Convex Polyhedral Analysis Tool for Logic Programs

Convex polyhedral abstractions of logic programs have been found very useful in deriving numeric relationships between program arguments in order to prove program properties and in other areas such as termination and complexity analysis. We present a tool for constructing polyhedral analyses of (constraint) logic programs. The aim of the tool is to make available, with a convenient interface, state-of-the-art techniques for polyhedral analysis such as delayed widening, narrowing, "widening up-to", and enhanced automatic selection of widening points. The tool is accessible on the web, permits user programs to be uploaded and analysed, and is integrated with related program transformations such as size abstractions and query-answer transformation. We then report some experiments using the tool, showing how it can be conveniently used to analyse transition systems arising from models of embedded systems, and an emulator for a PIC microcontroller which is used for example in wearable computing systems. We discuss issues including scalability, tradeoffs of precision and computation time, and other program transformations that can enhance the results of analysis.Comment: Paper presented at the 17th Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (WLPE2007

Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography

This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First, it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems, programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the literature

A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques

Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence of any backdoor to bypass a program's authentication. One approach would be to test the program using different, possibly random inputs. As the backdoor may only be hit for very specific program workloads, automated exploration of the space of possible inputs is of the essence. Symbolic execution provides an elegant solution to the problem, by systematically exploring many possible execution paths at the same time without necessarily requiring concrete inputs. Rather than taking on fully specified input values, the technique abstractly represents them as symbols, resorting to constraint solvers to construct actual instances that would cause property violations. Symbolic execution has been incubated in dozens of tools developed over the last four decades, leading to major practical breakthroughs in a number of prominent software reliability applications. The goal of this survey is to provide an overview of the main ideas, challenges, and solutions developed in the area, distilling them for a broad audience. The present survey has been accepted for publication at ACM Computing Surveys. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5FvcComment: This is the authors pre-print copy. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5Fv