Towards an automated approach for bug fix pattern detection

Understand

The characterization of bug datasets is essential to support the evaluation of automatic program repair tools.

• In a previous work, we manually studied almost 400 human-written patches (bug fixes) from the Defects4J dataset and annotated them with properties, such as repair patterns.
• However, manually finding these patterns in different datasets is tedious and time-consuming.
• To address this activity, we designed and implemented PPD, a detector of repair patterns in patches, which performs source code change analysis at abstract-syntax tree level.