An Analysis of the Impact of Automatically-Generated Patches on Coding Standard Violation

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a number of studies on automatic program repair (APR) techniques to reduce the burden on developers in fixing defects. The quality of patches generated by APR techniques is verified by passing test cases to determine if the patches are correct. However, coding standards after the patches are applied have not been taken into account in designing APR techniques. In this paper, we analyze the impact of automatically-generated patches (APR patches) on coding standard violations. As a result of analyzing three OSS projects, we found that APR techniques increased the number of coding standard violations by about 40% regardless of the types of coding standards (RQ1). We also found that most of coding standard violations generated by the APR techniques were minor but about 9% to 10% of the violations had an impact on the readability of source code(RQ2). Forthermore, we found that APR techniques that generate patches in a similar manner tend to generate similar cording standard violations(RQ3).