Warburton, R.
and Kalvala, S.
(2009)
Towards the automated correction of bugs.
Technical Report.
Department of Computer Science, Coventry, UK.
Abstract
Bugs within Java programs often fall within well-known motifs, usually arising from misunderstood APIs or language features that encourage buggy corner cases. Existing software development tools can detect some of these situations, and integrated development environments may attempt to suggest automated fixes for some of the simple cases. We present a language for specifying program transformations paired with a novel methodology for identifying and fixing bug patterns within Java source code. We propose a combination of source code and bytecode analyses: this allows for using the control flow in the bytecode to help identify the bugs while generating corrected source code. The specification language uses a combination of syntactic rewrite rules and dataflow analysis generated from temporal logic based conditions. We introduce a prototype implementation that allows application of these transformations automatically to programs, and discuss correctness issues within the context of such program transformations. Finally we discuss other possible areas of application for this methodology, including generating refactoring operations from specifications and application to other imperative languages.
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