Autorepairability: A New Software Quality Characteristic

Currently, research on automated program repair (in short, APR) is actively being conducted. APR techniques have been applied to many bugs in open-source software, but the probability of a successful fix is not very high. The authors consider that not only should APR techniques be developed, but software systems should be developed so that bugs can be easily fixed with APR techniques. In this paper, we propose autorepairability, a new characteristic of software quality, that shows how effective automated program repair techniques are for a specific code fragment, file, or project. We also show an approach to automatically measure autorepairability from the source code of a target project, and present experimental results on 1,282 Java method pairs. The use of autorepairability allows many studies to be conducted. For example, research on the development process for developing software systems with high autorepairability and research on refactoring, which transforms software with low autorepairability into software systems with high autorepairability, will be possible.