Communications of the ACM

Conceptually speaking, automated program repair closes the gap between the huge manual effort spent today in writing correct programs, and the ultimate dream of generating programs automatically via learning approaches. Given the challenges of generating multiline program fixes in program repair, we can thus imagine the difficulty of generating explainable programs automatically.

Pragmatically speaking, automated program repair also makes us keenly aware of the challenges in managing changes in software engineering projects, and the need for automation in this arena. Today, manual debugging and maintenance often takes up 80% of the resources in a software project, prompting practitioners to long declare a legacy crisis. 25 In the future, program repair can provide tool support by repairing bugs from complex changes in software projects. This can help resolve a dilemma of developers when managing program changes: “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.”d d Quote by Sydney J. Harris.

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