Characterizing Developer Use of Automatically Generated Patches
Name
1907.06535.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.5 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
aba4c33de37a3da46a5122b400547afa
Author(s)
Cambronero, Jose Pablo
Shen, Jiasi
Cito, Jurgen
Glassman, Elena
Rinard, Martin
Date Issued
October 2019
Journal
Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, VL/HCC
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Cambronero, Jose Pablo, Shen, Jiasi, Cito, Jurgen, Glassman, Elena and Rinard, Martin. 2019. "Characterizing Developer Use of Automatically Generated Patches." Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, VL/HCC, 2019-October.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2019 IEEE. We present a study that characterizes the way developers use automatically generated patches when fixing software defects. Our study tasked two groups of developers with repairing defects in C programs. Both groups were provided with the defective line of code. One was also provided with five automatically generated and validated patches, all of which modified the defective line of code, and one of which was correct. Contrary to our initial expectations, the group with access to the generated patches did not produce more correct patches and did not produce patches in less time. We characterize the main behaviors observed in experimental subjects: a focus on understanding the defect and the relationship of the patches to the original source code. Based on this characterization, we highlight various potentially productive directions for future developer-centric automatic patch generation systems.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818884
