CAREER: Quality Matters: Dynamic, Static and Proactive Analyses for Automated Program Repair

社会越来越依赖影响人类安全、隐私和其他重要问题的软件。软件工程师可以使用许多工具来识别错误并编写正确的代码。然而，由于开放错误的数量，这些错误的负面影响，以及开发人员修复它们的有限时间，程序员的生产力和软件质量是严重的问题。最近出现的一个研究领域是开发自动程序修复技术。如果要使自动程序修复成为通用测试人员的工具，这个项目将通过解决必须克服的一些挑战来推进软件测试和修复的状态。本研究的结果将减少软件缺陷的成本，提高软件质量，提高程序员的生产力。为了解决这个问题，该项目将开发基于Hoare逻辑合成新代码的修复技术，并通过自动减少假阴性为开发人员提供更好的补丁指导。该研究将扩展基于分离逻辑的bug发现分析，以构建经过验证的修复。这包括动态策略，即搜索并将给定错误修复问题的不同解决方案组合成可测量的通用补丁，以及静态技术，即为以前未发现的、难以通过测试发现的错误构建补丁。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Society is increasingly reliant on software that affects human safety, privacy, and other important concerns. Software engineers have many tools at their disposal to identify errors and write correct code. However, programmer productivity and software quality are serious problems due to the number of open bugs, the negative impact of these bugs, and limited time available to developers to fix them. A recently emerging area of research develops techniques for automatic program repair. This project will advance the state of software testing and repair by addressing some of the challenges that must be overcome if automatic program repair is to become a common tester's tool. The outcomes of this research will reduce the cost of software defects, improve the quality of software, and improve productivity of programmers.To attack this problem, the project will develop repair techniques that synthesize new code based on Hoare logic and provide better patch guidance for developers through automatic reduction of false negatives. The research will extend separation logic-based bug-finding analyses to construct verified fixes. This involves dynamic strategies that search for and then compose diverse solutions to a given bug repair problem into measurably general patches, also static techniques that construct patches for previously undiscovered bugs that are difficult to find via testing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.