Patch correctness assessment in automated program repair based on the impact of patches on production and test code

Test-based generate-and-validate automated program repair (APR) systems often generate many patches that pass the test suite without fixing the bug. The generated patches must be manually inspected by the developers, so previous research proposed various techniques for automatic correctness assessment of APR-generated patches. Among them, dynamic patch correctness assessment techniques rely on the assumption that, when running the originally passing test cases, the correct patches will not alter the program behavior in a significant way, e.g., removing the code implementing correct functionality of the program. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel technique, named Shibboleth, for automatic correctness assessment of the patches generated by test-based generate-andvalidate APR systems. Unlike existing works, the impact of the patches is captured along three complementary facets, allowing more effective patch correctness assessment. Specifically, we measure the impact of patches on both production code (via syntactic and semantic similarity) and test code (via code coverage of passing tests) to separate the patches that result in similar programs and that do not delete desired program elements. Shibboleth assesses the correctness of patches via both ranking and classification. We evaluated Shibboleth on 1,871 patches, generated by 29 Java-based APR systems for Defects4J programs. The technique outperforms state-of-the-art ranking and classification techniques. Specifically, in our ranking data set, in 43% (66%) of the cases, Shibboleth ranks the correct patch in top-1 (top-2) positions, and in classification mode applied on our classification data set, it achieves an accuracy and F1-score of 0.887 and 0.852, respectively. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.