Projektbeschreibung
Neuartige Methodik zur automatischen Fehlerbehebung
In den letzten Jahren ist das Gebiet der Softwaretechnik auf viel Interesse gestoßen und es hat an Zugkraft gewonnen, da es in fast jedem anderen Gebiet zum Einsatz kommen kann. Ungeachtet ihrer Popularität hat die Softwaretechnik jedoch seit ihren Anfängen mit großen Schwierigkeiten zu kämpfen. Zum Beispiel können immer wieder Fehler auftauchen, die unerwartete Folgen für die Software haben. Aus diesem Grund war die automatische Fehlerbehebung in der Gemeinschaft der Softwaretechnik schon immer ein Thema, das stets großes Interesse erregte. Bei der Suche nach Lösungen sind jedoch Probleme hinsichtlich der anzuwendenden Methodik aufgetreten. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt NATURAL hat die Entwicklung eines Software-Contributors zum Ziel, der unter Anwendung einer in natürlicher Sprache vorliegenden Beschreibung eines Problems, das bei der Nutzung auftritt, Code synthetisieren kann. Die neue Lösung wird radikale Veränderungen in der Softwaretechnik herbeiführen.
Ziel
Automatic bug fixing, i.e. the idea of having programs that fix other programs, is a long-standing dream that is increasingly embraced by the software engineering community. Indeed, despite the significant effort that humans put into reviewing code and running software test campaigns, programming mistakes slip by, with severe consequences. Fixing those mistakes automatically has recently been the focus of a number of potentially promising techniques. Proposed approaches are however recurrently criticized as being shallow (i.e. they mostly address unit test failures, which are often neither hard nor important problems).
Initial successes in automatic bug fixing are based on scenarios such as the following: when a bug is localized, patches are generated repetitively and automatically, through trial and error, until a valid patch is produced. The produced patch could then be later revised by developers. While the reported achievements are certainly worthwhile, they do not address what we believe is a more comprehensive challenge of software engineering: to systematically fix features of a software system based on end-user requirements.
The ambition of NATURAL is to develop a methodology for yielding an intelligent agent that is capable of receiving a natural language description of a problem that a user faces with a software feature, and then synthesizing code to address this problem so that it meets the user's expectations. Such a repair bot would be a trustworthy software contributor that is 1) first, targeting real bugs in production via exploiting bug reports, which remain largely under-explored, 2) second, aligning with the conversational needs of collaborative work via generating explanations for patch suggestions, 3) third, shifting the repair paradigm towards the design of self-improving systems via yielding novel algorithms that iteratively integrate feedback from humans. Ultimately, NATURAL will be transformative in the practice of software engineering.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Schlüsselbegriffe
Programm/Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
ERC-STG - Starting GrantGastgebende Einrichtung
4365 ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE
Luxemburg