Anil Koyuncu

University of Luxembourg

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automated test generation is gaining popularity, with much of the research focusing on metrics like compilability rate, code coverage and bug detection. However, an equally important quality metric is the presence of test smells design flaws or anti patterns in test code that hinder maintainability and rea...

Unit testing, crucial for identifying bugs in code modules like classes and methods, is often neglected by developers due to time constraints. Automated test generation techniques have emerged to address this, but often lack readability and require developer intervention. Large Language Models (LLMs), like GPT and Mistral, show promise in software...

Fix pattern-based patch generation is a promising direction in automated program repair (APR). Notably, it has been demonstrated to produce more acceptable and correct patches than the patches obtained with mutation operators through genetic programming. The performance of pattern-based APR systems, however, depends on the fix ingredients mined fro...

A large body of the literature on automated program repair develops approaches where patches are automatically generated to be validated against an oracle (e.g., a test suite). Because such an oracle can be imperfect, the generated patches, although validated by the oracle, may actually be incorrect. While the state of the art explores research dir...

Bug localization is a recurrent maintenance task in software development. It aims at identifying relevant code locations (e.g., code files) that must be inspected to fix bugs. When such bugs are reported by users, the localization process become often overwhelming as it is mostly a manual task due to incomplete and informal information (written in...

Much research on software engineering relies on experimental studies based on fault injection. Fault injection, however, is not often relevant to emulate real-world software faults since it “blindly” injects large numbers of faults. It remains indeed challenging to inject few but realistic faults that target a particular functionality in a program....

A large body of the literature on automated program repair develops approaches where patches are automatically generated to be validated against an oracle (e.g., a test suite). Because such an oracle can be imperfect, the generated patches, although validated by the oracle, may actually be incorrect. Our empirical work investigates different repres...

A significant body of automated program repair research has built approaches under the redundancy assumption. Patches are then heuristically generated by leveraging repair ingredients (change actions and donor code) that are found in code bases (either the buggy program itself or big code). For example, common change actions (i.e., fix patterns) ar...

Automated Program Repair (APR) has attracted significant attention from software engineering research and practice communities in the last decade. Several teams have recorded promising performance in fixing real bugs and there is a race in the literature to fix as many bugs as possible from established benchmarks. Gradually, repair performance of A...

Much research on software engineering and software testing relies on experimental studies based on fault injection. Fault injection, however, is not often relevant to emulate real-world software faults since it "blindly" injects large numbers of faults. It remains indeed challenging to inject few but realistic faults that target a particular functi...

Template-based program repair research is in need for a common ground to express fix patterns in a standard and reusable manner. We propose to build on the concept of generic patch (also known as semantic patch), which is widely used in the Linux community to automate code evolution. We advocate that generic patches could provide at the same time a...

A large body of the literature of automated program repair develops approaches where patches are generated to be validated against an oracle (e.g., a test suite). Because such an oracle can be imperfect, the generated patches, although validated by the oracle, may actually be incorrect. While the state of the art explore research directions that re...

Test-based automated program repair has been a prolific field of research in software engineering in the last decade. Many approaches have indeed been proposed, which leverage test suites as a weak, but affordable, approximation to program specifications. Although the literature regularly sets new records on the number of benchmark bugs that can be...

Patching is a common activity in software development. It is generally performed on a source code base to address bugs or add new functionalities. In this context, given the recurrence of bugs across projects, the associated similar patches can be leveraged to extract generic fix actions. While the literature includes various approaches leveraging...

Test-based automated program repair has been a prolific field of research in software engineering in the last decade. Many approaches have indeed been proposed, which leverage test suites as a weak, but affordable, approximation to program specifications. While the literature regularly sets new records on the number of benchmark bugs that can be fi...

Issue tracking systems are commonly used in modern software development for collecting feedback from users and developers. An ultimate automation target of software maintenance is then the systematization of patch generation for user-reported bugs. Although this ambition is aligned with the momentum of automated program repair, the literature has,...

Issue tracking systems are commonly used in modern software development for collecting feedback from users and developers. An ultimate automation target of software maintenance is then the systematization of patch generation for user-reported bugs. Although this ambition is aligned with the momentum of automated program repair, the literature has,...

We revisit the performance of template-based APR to build comprehensive knowledge about the effectiveness of fix patterns, and to highlight the importance of complementary steps such as fault localization or donor code retrieval. To that end, we first investigate the literature to collect, summarize and label recurrently-used fix patterns. Based on...

Fix patterns (a.k.a fix templates) are the main ingredients that drive a significant portion of automated program repair (APR) studies in the literature. As fix patterns become widely adopted in various approaches, it becomes critical to thoroughly assess the effectiveness of existing templates to establish a clear baseline for APR. In this paper,...

Many automated tasks in software maintenance rely on information retrieval techniques to identify specific information within unstructured data. Bug localization is such a typical task, where text in a bug report is analyzed to identify file locations in the source code that can be associated to the reported bug. Despite the promising results, the...

In this work, we investigate the practice of patch construction in the Linux kernel development, focusing on the differences between three patching processes: (1) patches crafted entirely manually to fix bugs, (2) those that are derived from warnings of bug detection tools, and (3) those that are automatically generated based on fix patterns. With...

Fix pattern-based patch generation is a promising direction in Automated Program Repair (APR). Notably, it has been demonstrated to produce more acceptable and correct patches than the patches obtained with mutation operators through genetic programming. The performance of pattern-based APR systems, however, depends on the fix ingredients mined fro...

Properly benchmarking Automated Program Repair (APR) systems should contribute to the development and adoption of the research outputs by practitioners. To that end, the research community must ensure that it reaches significant milestones by reliably comparing state-of-the-art tools for a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. In...

Code comprehension is critical in software maintenance. Towards providing tools and approaches to support maintenance tasks, researchers have investigated various research lines related to how software code can be described in an abstract form. So far, studies on change pattern mining, code clone detection, or semantic patch inference have mainly a...

In this work, we investigate the practice of patch construction in the Linux kernel development, focusing on the differences between three patching processes: (1) patches crafted entirely manually to fix bugs, (2) those that are derived from warnings of bug detection tools, and (3) those that are automatically generated based on fix patterns. With...