2023 Volume 40 Issue 1 Pages 1_45-1_56
For automated program repairs (APR), the cost of the patch generation process will be reduced if automatically-generated test suites can be used. Automatic test-case generation techniques often take classes as input. This study aims at identifying which classes should be given as input for the aforementioned technique. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the test suites that detected failures and the actual classes that had bugs fixed by developers. We observe the cases where test suites do not identify the classes fixed by developers as a cause of failures. We also find that these cases occur when the classes fixed by developers are on the traces generated by test suites' exercises. Based on this finding, we examine the impact of the automatically generated test-suites on the performance of APR. We demonstrate, taking into account all the classes exercised by the failed test cases, that the total number of generated patches decreases but the number of correct patches increases.
