Should fixing these failures be delegated to automated program repair?

Abstract

Program repair constitutes one of the major components of software maintenance that usually incurs a significant cost in software production. Automated program repair is supposed to help in reducing the software maintenance cost by automatically fixing software defects. Despite the recent advances in automated software repair, it is still very costly to wait for repair tools to produce valid repairs of defects. This paper addresses the following question: "Will an automated program repair technique find a repair for a defect within a reasonable time?". To answer this question, we build an oracle that can predict whether fixing a failure should be delegated to an automated repair technique. I..