Automated Fixing of Programs with Contracts

Understand

This paper describes AutoFix, an automatic debugging technique that can fix faults in general-purpose software.

• To provide high-quality fix suggestions and to enable automation of the whole debugging process, AutoFix relies on the presence of simple specification elements in the form of contracts (such as pre- and postconditions).
• Using contracts enhances the precision of dynamic analysis techniques for fault detection and localization, and for validating fixes.
• The only required user input to the AutoFix supporting tool is then a faulty program annotated with contracts; the tool produces a collection of validated fixes for the fault ranked according to an estimate of their suitability.