Evidence-Based Automated Program Fixing

Many programmers, when they encounter an error, would like to have the benefit of automatic fix suggestions—as long as they are, most of the time, adequate. Initial research in this direction has generally limited itself to specific areas, such as data structure classes with carefully designed interfaces, and relied on simple approaches. To provide high-quality fix suggestions in a broad area of applicability, the present work relies on the presence of contracts in the code, and on the availability of dynamic analysis to gather evidence on the values taken by expressions derived from the program text. The ideas have been built into the AutoFix-E2 automatic fix generator. Applications of AutoFix-E2 to general-purpose software, such as a library to manipulate documents, show that the approach provides an improvement over previous techniques, in particular purely model-based approaches.