Open-ended Exploration of the Program Repair Search Space with Mined Templates: the Next 8935 Patches for Defects4J

In this paper our goal is to perform an open-ended exploration of the program repair search space. Our idea is to collect the largest number of test-suite adequate patches, independently of whether they are fully correct or overfitting. For that, we design Cardumen, a repair approach based mined templates that has an ultra-large search space. We evaluate the capacity of Cardumen to discover test-suite adequate patches (aka plausible patches) over the 356 real bugs from Defects4J by Just et al. (2014). Cardumen finds 8935 patches over 77 bugs of Defects4J. This is the largest number of automatically synthesized patches ever reported, all patches being available in an openscience repository. Moreover, Cardumen identifies 8 unique patches, that are patches for Defects4J bugs that were never repaired in the whole history of program repair.