Fixing Recurring Crash Bugs via Analyzing Q&A Sites (T)

Abstract

Recurring bugs are common in software systems, especially in client programs that depend on the same framework. Existing research uses human-written templates, and is limited to certain types of bugs. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic approach to fixing recurring crash bugs via analyzing Q&A sites. By extracting queries from crash traces and retrieving a list of Q&A pages, we analyze the pages and generate edit scripts. Then we apply these scripts to target source code and filter out the incorrect patches. The empirical results show that our approach is accurate in fixing real-world crash bugs, and can complement existing bug-fixing approaches.