ICST 2025
Mon 31 March - Fri 4 April 2025 Naples, Italy
Wed 2 Apr 2025 11:30 - 11:45 at Room A - Testing, Localisation and Repair Chair(s): Shin Yoo

Software product line (SPL) systems are widely employed to develop industrial projects. For an SPL system, different products/variants are created by combining different subsets of the system features. Because of the interaction of the different features, a bug in the system could cause failures for some products (failing products), but not for others (passing products); such types of bugs are called variability bugs. Due to their variability characteristics, detecting and fixing bugs in SPL systems is challenging. There are several solutions for localizing buggy statements in these systems. However, there is still a lack of research on automatically fixing these bugs. In this work, we aim to make the first attempt at automatically fixing buggy statements in the source code of SPL systems. This paper proposes two approaches, single-product-based and multi-product-based, to repair the variability bugs in an SPL system to fix the failures of the failing products and not to break the correct behaviors of the passing products. For the single-product-based approach, each failing product is fixed individually, and the obtained patches are then propagated and validated on the other products of the system. For the multi-product-based approach, all the products are repaired simultaneously. The patches are generated and validated by all the sampled products of the system in each repair iteration. Moreover, to improve the repair performance of both approaches, we also introduce several heuristic rules for effectively and efficiently deciding where to fix (navigating modification points) and how to fix (selecting suitable modifications). These heuristic rules use intermediate validation results of the repaired programs as feedback to refine the fault localization results and evaluate the suitability of the modifications before actually applying and validating them by test execution. Our experimental results on a dataset of 318 variability bugs of five popular SPL systems show that the single-product-based approach is around 20 times better than the multi-product-based approach in the number of correct fixes. Notably, the heuristic rules could improve the performance of both approaches by increasing of 30-150% the number of correct fixes, and decreasing of 30-50% the number of attempted modification operations.

Wed 2 Apr

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

11:00 - 12:30
Testing, Localisation and RepairJournal-First Papers / Research Papers / Industry at Room A
Chair(s): Shin Yoo KAIST
11:00
15m
Talk
A Taxonomy of Integration-relevant Faults for Microservice Testing
Research Papers
Lena Gregor Technical University of Munich, Anja Hentschel Siemens AG, Leon Kastner Technical University of Munich, Alexander Pretschner TU Munich
Pre-print
11:15
15m
Talk
Suspicious Types and Bad Neighborhoods- Filtering Spectra with Compiler Information
Research Papers
Leonhard Applis Delft University of Technology, Matthías Páll Gissurarson Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, Annibale Panichella Delft University of Technology
11:30
15m
Talk
Summary of Automated Program Repair for Variability Bugs in Software Product Line Systems
Journal-First Papers
Thu-Trang Nguyen , Xiao-Yi Zhang University of Science and Technology Beijing, Paolo Arcaini National Institute of Informatics , Fuyuki Ishikawa National Institute of Informatics, Hieu Vo VNU University of Engineering and Technology
Link to publication DOI
11:45
15m
Talk
Automated Engineering of Domain-Specific Metamorphic Testing Environments
Journal-First Papers
Pablo Gómez-Abajo Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Pablo C Canizares Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, Alberto Núňez University Complutense of Madrid, Spain., Esther Guerra Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Juan de Lara Autonomous University of Madrid
Link to publication DOI
12:00
15m
Talk
Speculative Testing at Google with Transition Prediction
Industry
Link to publication Pre-print
12:15
15m
Talk
Challenges, Strategies, and Impacts: A Qualitative Study on UI Testing in CI/CD Processes from GitHub Developers’ Perspectives
Research Papers
XIAOXIAO GAN Virginia Tech, Huayu Liang Virginia Tech, Chris Brown Virginia Tech
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