Understanding the Non-Repairability Factors of Automated Program Repair Techniques

Automated Program Repair (APR) is becoming a hot topic in Software Engineering community with many approaches being proposed and experiments being performed over the years. The results obtained from different experiments can be used as practical guidance to advance APR techniques. However, researchers have generally ignored the biases with respect to the unexpected results generated by various APR techniques, in which case the repair process cannot be finished normally and is terminated with unexpected exceptions (referred to as the non-repairability factors). In this paper, we aim to thoroughly understand the reasons for such non-repairability factors of various APR techniques, thus to provide practical insights for diverse stakeholders to establish an unbiased evaluation of APR techniques. To achieve so, we performed a systematic study on the existing execution logs that are ended with unexpected exceptions collected from different APR studies. Specifically, we investigated different types of exceptions with their frequencies of occurrence, the behind reasons of such occurrences, as well as the impact of such exceptions on the repairability of APR techniques. Our experimental results reveal that: 1) non-repairability factors happen in 25.7% of our studied logs and are widespread among diverse combinations of APR tools with FL strategies; 2) Inherent defect of APR tools is the most common reason for the occurrence of the non-repairability factors; 3) the impact of the non-repairability factors on the performance of APR tools can be rather significant. Our empirical study indicates that it is of great importance to eliminate the biases from the non-repairability factors. We also highlight several implications for actions that we can take to eliminate such biases.