In this work, we investigate the practice of patch construction in the Linux kernel development, focusing on the differences between three patching processes: (1) patches crafted entirely manually to fix bugs, (2) those that are derived from warnings of bug detection tools, and (3) those that are automatically generated based on fix patterns. With this study, we provide to the research community concrete insights on the practice of patching as well as how the development community is currently embracing research and commercial patching tools to improve productivity in repair. The result of our study shows that tool-supported patches are increasingly adopted by the developer community while manually-written patches are accepted more quickly. Patch application tools enable developers to remain committed to contributing patches to the code base. Our findings also include that, in actual development processes, patches generally implement several change operations spread over the code, even for patches fixing warnings by bug detection tools. Finally, this study has shown that there is an opportunity to directly leverage the output of bug detection tools to readily generate patches that are appropriate for fixing the problem, and that are consistent with manually-written patches.
Wed 12 Jul Times are displayed in time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change
10:30 - 11:45: Program Repair and PatchingTechnical Papers at Bren 1414 Chair(s): Michael PradelTU Darmstadt | |||
10:30 - 10:55 Talk | Identifying Test-Suite-Overfitted Patches through Test Case Generation Technical Papers DOI | ||
10:55 - 11:20 Talk | Impact of Tool Support in Patch Construction Technical Papers Anil KoyuncuUniversity of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Tegawendé F. BissyandéUniversity of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Dongsun KimUniversity of Luxembourg, Jacques KleinUniversity of Luxembourg, Martin Monperrus, Yves Le TraonUniversity of Luxembourg DOI | ||
11:20 - 11:45 Talk | Automated Repair of Layout Cross Browser Issues using Search-Based Techniques Technical Papers Sonal MahajanUniversity of Southern California, USA, Abdulmajeed AlameerUniversity of Southern California, USA, Phil McMinnUniversity of Sheffield, William G.J. HalfondUniversity of Southern California DOI |