Accelerating Patch Validation for Program Repair with Interception-Based Execution Scheduling

Understand

Long patch validation time is a limiting factor for automated program repair (APR).

• Though the duality between patch validation and mutation testing is recognized, so far there exists no study of systematically adapting mutation testing techniques to general-purpose patch validation.
• To address this gap, we investigate existing mutation testing techniques and identify five classes of acceleration techniques that are suitable for general-purpose patch validation.
• Among them, mutant schemata and mutant deduplication have not been adapted to general-purpose patch validation due to the arbitrary changes that third-party APR approaches may introduce.