Fault localization using failure-related contexts for automatic program repair

Abstract

Fault localization is essential for conducting effective program repair. However, preliminary studies have shown that existing fault localization approaches do not take the requirements of automatic repair into account, and therefore restrict the repair performance. To address this issue, this paper presents the first study on designing fault localization approaches for automatic program repair, that is, we propose a fault localization approach using failure-related contexts in order to improve automatic program repair. The proposed approach first utilizes program slicing technique to construct a failure-related context, then evaluates the suspiciousness of each element in this context, and finally transfers the result of evaluation to automatic program repair techniques for performing repair on faulty programs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective to improve automatic repair performance.