Accurate Extraction of Bug Fix Pattern Occurrences using Abstract Syntax Tree Analysis
by Matias Martinez, Laurence Duchien and Martin Monperrus
Abstract: This manuscript presents an approach for studying the abundance of bug fix patterns. Bug fix patterns capture the knowledge on how to fix bugs, they are essential building blocks for research areas such as bug fix recommendation and automatic repair. In this paper, we focus on the problem of the accurate measurement of bug fix pattern abundance: how to reliably tell that one pattern is more common than another one? We propose an approach to formalizing bug fix patterns and an accurate instance pattern identification process that uses this formalization. Our technique is based on a tree differencing algorithm working with abstract syntax trees (AST). A comparative evaluation shows that our approach improves the accuracy of pattern instance identification by an order of magnitude.
Cite it:
Matias Martinez, Laurence Duchien and Martin Monperrus, "Accurate Extraction of Bug Fix Pattern Occurrences using Abstract Syntax Tree Analysis", Technical report, Inria hal-01075938, 2014.
[Accurate Extraction of Bug Fix Pattern Occurrences using Abstract Syntax Tree Analysis](https://hal.science/hal-01075938/file/bug-fix-pattern-identification.pdf)
\href{https://hal.science/hal-01075938/file/bug-fix-pattern-identification.pdf}{Accurate Extraction of Bug Fix Pattern Occurrences using Abstract Syntax Tree Analysis} % \cite{martinez:hal-01075938}
Bibtex Entry:
@techreport{martinez:hal-01075938,
title = {Accurate Extraction of Bug Fix Pattern Occurrences using Abstract Syntax Tree Analysis},
author = {Martinez, Matias and Duchien, Laurence and Monperrus, Martin},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-01075938/file/bug-fix-pattern-identification.pdf},
type = {Technical Report},
number = {hal-01075938},
institution = {{Inria}},
year = {2014},
}