Bugs that persist into releases of video games can have negative impacts on both developers and users, but particular aspects of testing in game development can lead to difficulties in effectively catching these missed bugs. It has become common practice for developers to apply updates to games in order to fix missed bugs. These updates are often accompanied by notes that describe the changes to the game included in the update. However, some bugs reappear even after an update attempts to fix them. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy for bug types in games that is based on prior work. We examine 12,122 bug fixes from 723 updates for 30 popular games on the Steam platform. We label the bug fixes included in these updates to identify the frequency of these different bug types, the rate at which bug types recur over multiple updates, and which bug types are treated as more severe. Additionally, we survey game developers regarding their experience with different bug types and what aspects of game development they most strongly associate with bug appearance. We find that Information bugs appear the most frequently in updates, while Crash bugs recur the most frequently and are often treated as more severe than other bug types. Finally, we find that challenges in testing, code quality, and bug reproduction have a close association with bug persistence. These findings should help developers identify which aspects of game development could benefit from greater attention in order to prevent bugs. Researchers can use our results in devising tools and methods to better identify and address certain bug types.
Static analyzers help find bugs early by warning about recurring bug categories. While fixing these bugs still remains a mostly manual task in practice, we observe that fixes for a specific bug category often are repetitive. This paper addresses the problem of automatically fixing instances of common bugs by learning from past fixes. We present Getafix, an approach that produces human-like fixes while being fast enough to suggest fixes in time proportional to the amount of time needed to obtain static analysis results in the first place. Getafix is based on a novel hierarchical clustering algo…
Contextual information plays a vital role for software developers when understanding and fixing a bug. Consequently, deep learning-based program repair techniques leverage context for bug fixes. However, existing techniques treat context in an arbitrary manner, by extracting code in close proximity of the buggy statement within the enclosing file, class, or method, without any analysis to find actual relations with the bug. To reduce noise, they use a predefined maximum limit on the number of tokens to be used as context. We present a program slicing-based approach, in which instead of arbitra…
Millions of open-source projects with numerous bug fixes are available in code repositories. This proliferation of software development histories can be leveraged to learn how to fix common programming bugs. To explore such a potential, we perform an empirical study to assess the feasibility of using Neural Machine Translation techniques for learning bug-fixing patches for real defects. First, we mine millions of bug-fixes from the change histories of projects hosted on GitHub, in order to extract meaningful examples of such bug-fixes. Next, we abstract the buggy and corresponding fixed code, …
Software is prone to bugs and failures. Security bugs are those that expose or share privileged information and access in violation of the software's requirements. Given the seriousness of security bugs, there are centralized mechanisms for supporting and tracking these bugs across multiple products, one such mechanism is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID description. When a bug gets a CVE, it is referenced by its CVE ID. Thus we explore thousands of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, on Github, to determine if developers reference or discuss CVEs in their code, …
Regular expressions cause string-related bugs and open security vulnerabilities for DOS attacks. However, beyond ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service), little is known about the extent to which regular expression issues affect software development and how these issues are addressed in practice. We conduct an empirical study of 356 merged regex-related pull request bugs from Apache, Mozilla, Facebook, and Google GitHub repositories. We identify and classify the nature of the regular expression problems, the fixes, and the related changes in the test code. The most important findings in t…
Real bug fixes found in open source repositories seem to be the perfect source for learning to localize and repair real bugs. However, the absence of large scale bug fix collections has made it difficult to effectively exploit real bug fixes in the training of larger neural models in the past. In contrast, artificial bugs -- produced by mutating existing source code -- can be easily obtained at a sufficient scale and are therefore often preferred in the training of existing approaches. Still, localization and repair models that are trained on artificial bugs usually underperform when faced wit…
Mutation testing has been widely accepted as an approach to guide test case generation or to assess the effectiveness of test suites. Empirical studies have shown that mutants are representative of real faults; yet they also indicated a clear need for better, possibly customized, mutation operators and strategies. While methods to devise domain-specific or general-purpose mutation operators from real faults exist, they are effort- and error-prone, and do not help the tester to decide whether and how to mutate a given source code element. We propose a novel approach to automatically learn mutan…
SWE-at-Scale: Scalable Issue Synthesis from Historical Bug Fixes
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；North China Electric Power University（华北电力大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究所）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
In a software project, esp. in open-source, a contribution is a valuable piece of work made to the project: writing code, reporting bugs, translating, improving documentation, creating graphics, etc. We are now at the beginning of an exciting era where software bots will make contributions that are of similar nature than those by humans. Dry contributions, with no explanation, are often ignored or rejected, because the contribution is not understandable per se, because they are not put into a larger context, because they are not grounded on idioms shared by the core community of developers. We…
Background: Security regressions are vulnerabilities introduced in a previously unaffected software system. They often happen as a result of source code changes (e.g., a bug fix) and can have severe effects. Aims: To increase the understanding of security regressions. This is an important step in developing secure software engineering. Method: We perform an exploratory, mixed-method case study of Mozilla. First, we analyze 78 regression vulnerabilities and 72 bug reports where a bug fix introduced a regression vulnerability at Mozilla. We investigate how developers interact in these bug report…
Training a deep learning model on source code has gained significant traction recently. Since such models reason about vectors of numbers, source code needs to be converted to a code representation before vectorization. Numerous approaches have been proposed to represent source code, from sequences of tokens to abstract syntax trees. However, there is no systematic study to understand the effect of code representation on learning performance. Through a controlled experiment, we examine the impact of various code representations on model accuracy and usefulness in deep learning-based program re…
Bug fixing is generally a manually-intensive task. However, recent work has proposed the idea of automated program repair, which aims to repair (at least a subset of) bugs in different ways such as code mutation, etc. Following in the same line of work as automated bug repair, in this paper we aim to leverage past fixes to propose fixes of current/future bugs. Specifically, we propose Ratchet, a corrective patch generation system using neural machine translation. By learning corresponding pre-correction and post-correction code in past fixes with a neural sequence-to-sequence model, Ratchet is…
Single statement bugs are one of the most important ingredients in the evaluation of modern bug detection and automatic program repair methods. By affecting only a single statement, single statement bugs represent a type of bug often overlooked by developers, while still being small enough to be detected and fixed by automatic methods. With the rise of data-driven automatic repair the availability of single statement bugs at the scale of millionth of examples is more important than ever; not only for testing these methods but also for providing sufficient real world examples for training. To p…
Software debugging, and program repair are among the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks in software engineering that would benefit a lot from automation. In this paper, we propose a novel automated program repair approach based on CodeBERT, which is a transformer-based neural architecture pre-trained on large corpus of source code. We fine-tune our model on the ManySStuBs4J small and large datasets to automatically generate the fix codes. The results show that our technique accurately predicts the fixed codes implemented by the developers in 19-72% of the cases, depending on the typ…
High-quality and large-scale repositories of real bugs and their concise patches collected from real-world applications are critical for research in software engineering community. In such a repository, each real bug is explicitly associated with its fix. Therefore, on one side, the real bugs and their fixes} may inspire novel approaches for finding, locating, and repairing software bugs; on the other side, the real bugs and their fixes are indispensable for rigorous and meaningful evaluation of approaches for software testing, fault localization, and program repair. To this end, a number of s…
Significant interest in applying Deep Neural Network (DNN) has fueled the need to support engineering of software that uses DNNs. Repairing software that uses DNNs is one such unmistakable SE need where automated tools could be beneficial; however, we do not fully understand challenges to repairing and patterns that are utilized when manually repairing DNNs. What challenges should automated repair tools address? What are the repair patterns whose automation could help developers? Which repair patterns should be assigned a higher priority for building automated bug repair tools? This work prese…
As quantum programming evolves, more and more quantum programming languages are being developed. As a result, debugging and testing quantum programs have become increasingly important. While bug fixing in classical programs has come a long way, there is a lack of research in quantum programs. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive study on bug fixing in quantum programs. We collect and investigate 96 real-world bugs and their fixes from four popular quantum programming languages Qiskit, Cirq, Q#, and ProjectQ). Our study shows that a high proportion of bugs in quantum programs are qu…
Central China Normal University（华中师范大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Deep learning frameworks (DLFs) have been playing an increasingly important role in this intelligence age since they act as a basic infrastructure for an increasingly wide range of AIbased applications. Meanwhile, as multi-programming-language (MPL) software systems, DLFs are inevitably suffering from bugs caused by the use of multiple programming languages (PLs). Hence, it is of paramount significance to understand the bugs (especially the bugs involving multiple PLs, i.e., MPL bugs) of DLFs, which can provide a foundation for preventing, detecting, and resolving bugs in the development of DL…
Bug detection and prevention is one of the most important goals of software quality assurance. Nowadays, many of the major problems faced by developers can be detected or even fixed fully or partially with automatic tools. However, recent works explored that there exists a substantial amount of simple yet very annoying errors in code-bases, which are easy to fix, but hard to detect as they do not hinder the functionality of the given product in a major way. Programmers introduce such errors accidentally, mostly due to inattention. Using the ManySStuBs4J dataset, which contains many simple, stu…
Software development life cycle is profoundly influenced by bugs: their introduction, identification, and eventual resolution account for a significant portion of software cost. This has motivated software engineering researchers and practitioners to propose different approaches for automating the identification and repair of software defects. Large language models have been adapted to the program repair task through few-shot demonstration learning and instruction prompting, treating this as an infilling task. However, these models have only focused on learning general bug-fixing patterns for …
Many automated program repair techniques have been proposed for fixing bugs. Some of these techniques use the information beyond the given buggy program and test suite to improve the quality of generated patches. However, there are several limitations that hinder the wide adoption of these techniques, including (1) they rely on a fixed set of repair templates for patch generation or reference implementation, (2) searching for the suitable reference implementation is challenging, (3) generated patches are not explainable. Meanwhile, a recent approach shows that similar bugs exist across differe…
WebAssembly (abbreviated WASM) has emerged as a promising language of the Web and also been used for a wide spectrum of software applications such as mobile applications and desktop applications. These applications, named as WASM applications, commonly run in WASM runtimes. Bugs in WASM runtimes are frequently reported by developers and cause the crash of WASM applications. However, these bugs have not been well studied. To fill in the knowledge gap, we present a systematic study to characterize and detect bugs in WASM runtimes. We first harvest a dataset of 311 real-world bugs from hundreds o…
Bugs that surface in mobile applications can be difficult to reproduce and fix due to several confounding factors including the highly GUI-driven nature of mobile apps, varying contextual states, differing platform versions and device fragmentation. It is clear that developers need support in the form of automated tools that allow for more precise reporting of application defects in order to facilitate more efficient and effective bug fixes. In this paper, we present a tool aimed at supporting application testers and developers in the process of On-Device Bug Reporting. Our tool, called ODBR, …
Labelling Bug-Fixing Commits with Local Open-Weight Language Models
Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna（维也纳大学计算机学院）；SBA Research gGmbH（SBA研究所）；Christian Doppler Laboratory AsTra, University of Vienna（维也纳大学AsTra克里斯蒂安·多普勒实验室）
Program repair is an important but difficult software engineering problem. One way to achieve acceptable performance is to focus on classes of simple bugs, such as bugs with single statement fixes, or that match a small set of bug templates. However, it is very difficult to estimate the recall of repair techniques for simple bugs, as there are no datasets about how often the associated bugs occur in code. To fill this gap, we provide a dataset of 153,652 single statement bug-fix changes mined from 1,000 popular open-source Java projects, annotated by whether they match any of a set of 16 bug t…
Static bug finders have been widely-adopted by developers to find bugs in real world software projects. They leverage predefined heuristic static analysis rules to scan source code or binary code of a software project, and report violations to these rules as warnings to be verified. However, the advantages of static bug finders are overshadowed by such issues as uncovered obvious bugs, false positives, etc. To improve these tools, many techniques have been proposed to filter out false positives reported or design new static analysis rules. Nevertheless, the under-performance of bug finders can…
Research in automatic program repair has shown that real bugs can be automatically fixed. However, there are several challenges involved in such a task that are not yet fully addressed. As an example, consider that a test-suite-based repair tool performs a change in a program to fix a bug spotted by a failing test case, but then the same or another test case fails. This could mean that the change is a partial fix for the bug or that another bug was manifested. However, the repair tool discards the change and possibly performs other repair attempts. One might wonder if the applied change should…
Resolving bugs in the maintenance phase of software is a complicated task. Bug assignment is one of the main tasks for resolving bugs. Some Bugs cannot be fixed properly without making design decisions and have to be assigned to designers, rather than programmers, to avoid emerging bad smells that may cause subsequent bug reports. Hence, it is important to refer some bugs to the designer to check the possible design flaws. Based on our best knowledge, there are a few works that have considered referring bugs to designers. Hence, this issue is considered in this work. In this paper, a dataset i…
Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs. Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three…
