SBIR Phase I: Programmer-Friendly Automatic Code Fixes

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是开发工具并将其推向市场，这些工具可以提高代码质量并帮助避免危险的错误，同时还可以提高程序员的工作效率。糟糕的代码质量会导致错误，这往往会导致经济损失，甚至会危及人类的生命。NIST的一项研究估计，软件漏洞每年造成590亿美元的损失。这个项目的关键方面是一种程序员友好的语言，用于描述软件修复。程序员社区成功采用这种语言可以对软件社区产生深远的积极影响：程序员将拥有一种共同的、正式的语言来讨论修复错误的方法，他们的协作结果可以用于自动修复软件系统。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目将解决为程序员提供一种语言来表达他们对错误模式及其修复的知识的研究和技术挑战，以及一个使用这些信息来检查和修复软件系统的工具。研究的目标是改进语言，使其易于程序员使用，并提供可伸缩的基础设施。这将通过反复改进语言和辅助基础设施以及早期用户的反馈来实现。预期的结果是，该技术将适用于各种错误和大型代码库。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop and bring to market tools that improve code quality and help avoid dangerous bugs, while also improving programmer productivity. Poor code quality leads to bugs which often translate into financial loses and can even endanger human life. A study by NIST estimated software bugs cost $59 billion annually. The key aspect of this project is a programmer-friendly language for describing software fixes. Successful adoption of the language by the programmer community can have a far-reaching positive impact upon the software community: programmers will have a common, formal, language to discuss ways to fix bugs, and the result of their collaboration could be used to automatically fix software systems.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address the research and technical challenges in providing programmers with a language to express their knowledge of error patterns and their fixes, and a tool that uses this information to check and fix software systems. The research objective is to refine the language such that it is easy to use by programmers, and to provide a scalable infrastructure. This will be achieved by iteratively improving both the language and the supporting infrastructure with feedback from early users. The anticipated result is that the technology will be applicable to a wide variety of bugs and to large code bases.