VFix: Value-Flow-Guided Precise Program Repair for Null Pointer Dereferences

Xu, X; Sui, Y; Yan, H; Xue, J

VFix: Value-Flow-Guided Precise Program Repair for Null Pointer Dereferences

Xu, X Sui, Y

Yan, H Xue, J

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Publication Type:: Conference Proceeding
Citation:: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering, 2019, 2019-May pp. 512 - 523
Issue Date:: 2019-05-01

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Xu, X	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Sui, Y https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9510-6574	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Yan, H	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Xue, J	en_US
dc.date.available	2021-08-26T19:00:33Z
dc.date.issued	2019-05-01	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering, 2019, 2019-May pp. 512 - 523	en_US
dc.identifier.isbn	9781728108698	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	0270-5257	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/137410
dc.description.abstract	© 2019 IEEE. Automated Program Repair (APR) faces a key challenge in efficiently generating correct patches from a potentially infinite solution space. Existing approaches, which attempt to reason about the entire solution space, can be ineffective (by often producing no plausible patches at all) and imprecise (by often producing plausible but incorrect patches). We present VFIX, a new value-flow-guided APR approach, to fix null pointer exception (NPE) bugs by considering a substantially reduced solution space in order to greatly increase the number of correct patches generated. By reasoning about the data and control dependences in the program, VFIX can identify bug-relevant repair statements more accurately and generate more correct repairs than before. VFIX outperforms a set of 8 state-of-the-art APR tools in fixing the NPE bugs in Defects4j in terms of both precision (by correctly fixing 3 times as many bugs as the most precise one and 50% more than all the bugs correctly fixed by these 8 tools altogether) and efficiency (by producing a correct patch in minutes instead of hours).	en_US
dc.relation.ispartof	Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering	en_US
dc.relation.isbasedon	10.1109/ICSE.2019.00063	en_US
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess
dc.title	VFix: Value-Flow-Guided Precise Program Repair for Null Pointer Dereferences	en_US
dc.type	Conference Proceeding
utslib.citation.volume	2019-May	en_US
pubs.embargo.period	Not known	en_US
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology/School of Computer Science
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Strength - CAI - Centre for Artificial Intelligence
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*
pubs.publication-status	Published	en_US
pubs.volume	2019-May	en_US

Abstract:

© 2019 IEEE. Automated Program Repair (APR) faces a key challenge in efficiently generating correct patches from a potentially infinite solution space. Existing approaches, which attempt to reason about the entire solution space, can be ineffective (by often producing no plausible patches at all) and imprecise (by often producing plausible but incorrect patches). We present VFIX, a new value-flow-guided APR approach, to fix null pointer exception (NPE) bugs by considering a substantially reduced solution space in order to greatly increase the number of correct patches generated. By reasoning about the data and control dependences in the program, VFIX can identify bug-relevant repair statements more accurately and generate more correct repairs than before. VFIX outperforms a set of 8 state-of-the-art APR tools in fixing the NPE bugs in Defects4j in terms of both precision (by correctly fixing 3 times as many bugs as the most precise one and 50% more than all the bugs correctly fixed by these 8 tools altogether) and efficiency (by producing a correct patch in minutes instead of hours).

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/137410