Production-Driven Patch Generation and Validation

Abstract

We envision a world where the developer would receive each morning in her GitHub dashboard a list of potential patches that fix certain production failures. For this, we propose a novel program repair scheme, with the unique feature of being applicable to production directly. We present the design and implementation of a prototype system for Java, called Itzal, that performs patch generation for uncaught exceptions in production. We have performed two empirical experiments to validate our system: the first one on 34 failures from 14 different software applications, the second one on 16 seeded failures in 3 real open-source e-commerce applications for which we have set up a realistic user traffic. This validates the novel and disruptive idea of using program repair directly in production.

References in corpus (5)

• Nopol: Automatic Repair of Conditional Statement Bugs in Java Programs
• Automatic Repair of Real Bugs in Java: A Large-Scale Experiment on the Defects4J Dataset
• Automatic Repair of Buggy If Conditions and Missing Preconditions with SMT
• Dynamic Patch Generation for Null Pointer Exceptions using Metaprogramming
• BanditRepair: Speculative Exploration of Runtime Patches