Test-based automatic program repair has attracted a lot of attention in
recent years. However, the test suites in practice are often too weak to
guarantee correctness and existing approaches often generate a large number of
incorrect patches.
To reduce the number of incorrect patches generated, we propose a novel
approach that heuristically determines the correctness of the generated
patches. The core idea is to exploit the behavior similarity of test case
executions. The passing tests on original and patched programs are likely to
behave similarly while the failing tests on original and patched programs are
likely to behave differently. Also, if two tests exhibit similar runtime
behavior, the two tests are likely to have the same test results. Based on
these observations, we generate new test inputs to enhance the test suites and
use their behavior similarity to determine patch correctness.
Our approach is evaluated on a dataset consisting of 139 patches generated
from existing program repair systems including jGenProg, Nopol, jKali, ACS and
HDRepair. Our approach successfully prevented 56.3\% of the incorrect patches
to be generated, without blocking any correct patches.Comment: ICSE 201