abstract = "Automated program repair can save tremendous manual
efforts in software debugging. Therefore, a huge body
of research efforts have been dedicated to design and
implement automated program repair techniques. Among
the existing program repair techniques,
genetic-programming-based techniques have shown
promising results. Recently, researchers found that
random-search-based and adaptive program repair
techniques can also produce effective results. In this
work, we performed an extensive study for four program
repair techniques, including genetic-programming-based,
random-search-based, brute-force-based and adaptive
program repair techniques. Due to the extremely large
time cost of the studied techniques, the study was
performed on 153 bugs from 9 small to medium sized
programs. In the study, we further investigated the
impacts of different programs and test suites on
effectiveness and efficiency of program repair
techniques. We found that techniques that work well
with small programs become too costly or ineffective
when applied to medium sized programs. We also computed
the false positive rates and discussed the ratio of the
explored search space to the whole search space for
each studied technique. Surprisingly, all the studied
techniques except the random-search-based technique are
consistent with the 80/20 rule, i.e., about 80percent
of successful patches are found within the first
20percent of search space.",
notes = "Sch. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Southeast Univ., Nanjing,
China