Must Fault Localization for Program Repair

Abstract

This work is concerned with fault localization for automated program repair. We define a novel concept of a must location set. Intuitively, such a set includes at least one program location from every repair for a bug. Thus, it is impossible to fix the bug without changing at least one location from this set. A fault localization technique is considered a must algorithm if it returns a must location set for every buggy program and every bug in the program. We show that some traditional fault localization techniques are not must. We observe that the notion of must fault localization depends on the chosen repair scheme, which identifies the changes that can be applied to program statements as part of a repair. We develop a new algorithm for fault localization and prove that it is must with respect to commonly used schemes in automated program repair. We incorporate the new fault localization technique into an existing mutation-based program repair algorithm. We exploit it in order to prune the search space when a buggy mutated program has been generated. Our experiments show that must fault localization is able to significantly speed-up the repair process, without losing any of the potential repairs.