WG211/M13LeGoues

Software quality is a pernicious problem. Although 40 years of software engineering research has provided developers considerable debugging support, actual bug repair remains a predominantly manual, and thus expensive and time-consuming, process. I will describe GenProg, a technique that uses meta heuristic search strategies to automatically fix software bugs using only a program’s source code and existing test suite. My empirical evidence demonstrates that GenProg can quickly and cheaply fix a large proportion of real-world bugs in large open-source C programs.