ACDC: Altering Control Dependence Chains for Automated Patch Generation

Understand

Once a failure is observed, the primary concern of the developer is to identify what caused it in order to repair the code that induced the incorrect behavior.

• Until a permanent repair is afforded, code repair patches are invaluable.
• The aim of this work is to devise an automated patch generation technique that proceeds as follows: Step1) It identifies a set of failure-causing control dependence chains that are minimal in terms of number and length.
• Step2) It identifies a set of predicates within the chains along with associated execution instances, such that negating the predicates at the given instances would exhibit correct behavior.