Failure-Driven Program Repair

Program repair techniques can dramatically reduce the cost of program debugging by automatically generating program fixes. Although program repair has been already successful with several classes of faults, it also turned out to be quite limited in the complexity of the fixes that can be generated. This Ph.D. thesis addresses the problem of cost-effectively generating fixes of higher complexity by investigating how to exploit failure information to directly shape the repair process. In particular, this thesis proposes Failure-Driven Program Repair, which is a novel approach to program repair that exploits its knowledge about both the possible failures and the corresponding repair strategies, to produce highly specialized repair tasks that can effectively generate non-trivial fixes.