Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Preprint of new article: Victoria Kananchuk, Ilgiz Mustafin and Bertrand Meyer, Bugfix: a standard language, database schema and repository for research on bugs and automatic program repair, submitted for publication, February 2025. Available on arXiv here. Also available here.

What this is in a nutshell (there is a longer abstract below): a proposal for, and first steps towards, helping work on Automatic Program Repair (APR) by providing a common framework, including: a language for describing bugs and fixes in a standard way; the same functionality available as an API (using JSON); and a repository (a database) accessible in that framework and containing  numerous bugs and fixes produced by researchers and practitioners.

The article draws on a short paper at the APR workshop of ICSE last year; I plan to use it as a basis for my keynote at the next workshop at ICSE in Ottawa on May 29. Rather than a paper describing firm results, this paper is meant to start a process; quoting from one of the final paragraphs:

The present work should be viewed as a community-service contribution: it is meant to help everyone interested in bugs and their automatic repair, particularly researchers in the field, to achieve new advances by relieving them of common and repetitive tasks, facilitating the assessment of new techniques, and making it possible to compare the effectiveness of competing or complementary approaches by providing a common reference.

It remains to see if anyone is interested!

Credits: much of the work (especially the construction of the repository) was carried out by Victoria Kananchuk as part of a master thesis; Ilgiz Mustafin particularly contributed to the JSON interface.

Here is the full abstract:

Automatic Program Repair (APR) is a brilliant idea: when detecting a bug, also provide suggestions for correct- ing the program.

Over the past decades, researchers have come up with promising techniques for making APR a mainstay of software development. Progress towards that goal is, however, hindered by the absence of a common frame of reference to support and compare the multiplicity of ideas, methods, tools, programming languages and programming environments for carrying out automatic program repair.

Bugfix, described in this article, is an effort at providing such a framework: a standardized set of notations, tools and interfaces, as well as a database of bugs and fixes, for use by the APR research community to try out its ideas and compare the results on an objective basis. The most directly visible component of the Bugfix effort is the Bugfix language, a human-readable formalism making it possible to describe elements of the following kinds: a bug (described abstractly, for example the permutation of two arguments in a call); a bug example (an actual occurrence of a bug, in a specific code written in a specific programming language, and usually recorded in some repository); a fix (a particular correction of a bug, obtained for example by reversing the misplaced arguments); an application (an entity that demonstrates how a actual code example matches with a fix); a construct (the abstract description of a programming mechanism, for example a “while” loop, independently of its realization in a programming language; and a language (a description of how a particular programming language includes certain constructs and provides specific concrete syntax for each of them — for example Java includes loop, assignment etc. and has a defined format for each of them).

The language is only one way to access this information. A JSON-based program interface (API) provides it in a form accessible to tools, which may record and access such information into databases.

Bugfix includes such a database (repository), containing a considerable amount of bugs, examples and fixes. We hope that this foundational work will help the APR research community to advance the field by providing a common yardstick and repository.

 

Reminder: my full annotated publication list is here.

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