Modern automated program repair (APR) is well-tuned to finding and repairing
bugs that introduce observable erroneous behavior to a program. However, a
significant class of bugs does not lead to such observable behavior (e.g.,
liveness/termination bugs, non-functional bugs, and information flow bugs).
Such bugs can generally not be handled with current APR approaches, so, as a
community, we need to develop complementary techniques.
To stimulate the systematic study of alternative APR approaches and hybrid
APR combinations, we devise a novel bug classification system that enables
methodical analysis of their bug detection power and bug repair capabilities.
To demonstrate the benefits, we analyze the repair of termination bugs in
sequential and concurrent programs. The study shows that integrating dynamic
APR with formal analysis techniques, such as termination provers and software
model checkers, reduces complexity and improves the overall reliability of
these repairs.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 22nd IEEE International Conference on
Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS 2022