Propagating Bug Fixes with Fast Subgraph Matching

Abstract

We present a powerful and efficient approach to the problem of propagating a bug fix to all the locations in a code base to which it applies. Our approach represents bug and fix patterns as subgraphs of a system dependence graph, and it employs a fast, index-based subgraph matching algorithm to discover unfixed bug-pattern instances remaining in a code base. We have also developed a graphical tool to help programmers specify bug patterns and fix patterns easily. We evaluated our approach by applying it to bug fixes in four large open-source projects. The results indicate that the approach exhibits good recall and precision and excellent efficiency.