GMU Software Engineering Seminar Series<http://cs.gmu.edu/~smalek/seminar.html>

Speaker: Westley Weimer
Title: Adaptive Program Repair via Program Equivalence: A Duality With Mutation Testing
Date/Time: Wednesday, 6/5/2013 @ 11am
Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Informal Abstract for Busy Grad Students:
Ever wondered how or why automated program repair works? In this talk we analyze why it is expensive, how we can be smarter up front to avoid those costs, and why it can profitably be viewed as the dual of a classic problem in software engineering. Stop by to hear about how these insights lead to an order-of-magnitude improvement.

Real Abstract:
Software bugs remain a compelling problem.  Automated program repair is a promising approach for reducing cost, and many methods have recently demonstrated positive results. However, success on any particular bug is variable, as is the cost to find a repair. This talk focuses on generate-and-validate repair methods that enumerate candidate repairs and use test cases to define correct behavior. We formalize repair cost in terms of test executions, which dominate most test-based repair algorithms. Insights from this model lead to a novel deterministic repair algorithm that computes a patch quotient space with respect to an approximate semantic equivalence relation. Generate-and-validate program repair is shown to be a dual of mutation testing, directly suggesting possible cross-fertilization. Evaluating on 105 real-world bugs in programs totaling 5MLOC and involving 10,000 tests, our new algorithm requires an order-of-magnitude fewer test evaluations than the previous state-of-the-art and is over five times more efficient monetarily. This talk presents work that is currently under submission.

Bio: Westley Weimer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. His main research interest lies in advancing software quality by using both static and dynamic programming language approaches. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/