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Title: Towards s/engineer/bot: Principles for Program Repair Bots
Of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on developer wages, up to 25% accounts for fixing bugs. Companies like Google save significant human effort and engineering costs with automatic bug detection tools, yet automatically fixing them is still a nascent endeavour. Very recent work (including our own) demonstrates the feasibility of automatic program repair in practice. As automated repair technology matures, it presents great appeal for integration into developer workflows. We believe software bots are a promising vehicle for realizing this integration, as they bridge the gap between human software development and automated processes. We envision repair bots orchestrating automated refactoring and bug fixing. To this end, we explore what building a repair bot entails. We draw on our understanding of patch generation, validation, and real world software development interactions to identify six principles that bear on engineering repair bots and discuss related design challenges for integrating human workflows. Ultimately, this work aims to foster critical focus and interest for making repair bots a reality.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1750116
PAR ID:
10135836
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM 1st International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
43 to 47
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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