At ICSE'2013, there was the first session ever dedicated to automatic program repair. In this session, presented PAR, a novel template-based approach for fixing Java bugs. We strongly disagree with key points of this paper. Our critical review has two goals. First, we aim at explaining why we disagree with Kim and colleagues and why the reasons behind this disagreement are important for research on automatic software repair in general. Second, we aim at contributing to the field with a clarification of the essential ideas behind automatic software repair. In particular we discuss the main evaluation criteria of automatic software repair: understandability, correctness and completeness. We show that depending on how one sets up the repair scenario, the evaluation goals may be contradictory. Eventually, we discuss the nature of fix acceptability and its relation to the notion of software correctness.
@cite_15: Mutation Testing is a fault-based software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades. The literature on Mutation Testing has contributed a set of approaches, tools, developments, and empirical results. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and survey of Mutation Testing. The paper also presents the results of several development trend analyses. These analyses provide evidence that Mutation Testing techniques and tools are reaching a state of maturity and applicability, while the topic of Mutation Testing itself is the subject of increasing interest.
In software testing, and in particular in the field of mutation testing, a fault class'' or fault model'' describes kinds of programmer mistakes (in a particular language, domain, etc) @cite_15 . Each mutation operator is intended to simulate one of those mistakes. Tolerating bugs, simulating faults, repairing bugs: in all cases, there is a real need to describe the classes of bugs that are handled by a novel technique.