ASTOR: Evolutionary Automatic Software Repair for Java
This addresses the issue for the software engineering research community by enabling reproducible evaluations and comparisons, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of unreproducible evaluations in automatic software repair by developing ASTOR, a publicly available tool that implements three state-of-the-art approaches for Java programs, including GenProg and a subset of PAR's templates, and made it open-source under GPL v2.
Context: During last years, many automatic software repair approaches have been presented by the software engineering research community. According to the corresponding papers, these approaches are able to repair real defects from open source projects. Problematic: Some previous publications in the automatic repair field do not provide the implementation of theirs approaches. Consequently, it is not possible for the research community to re-execute the original evaluation, to set up new evaluations (for example, to evaluate the performance against new defects) or to compare approaches against each others. Solution: We propose a publicly available automatic software repair tool called Astor. It implements three state-of-the-art automatic software repair approaches in the context of Java programs (including GenProg and a subset of PAR's templates). The source code of Astor is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL v2).