Guest Lecture: It Does What You Say, Not What You Mean: Lessons From A Decade of Program Repair

Guest Speaker: Prof. Westley Weimer

Time: Tuesday, Sep 20, 2022. 11:00am -- 12:15pm

Location: Zoom (Zoom link is released via Piazza). Students are not required to present in person in the classroom.

Talk Intro

This talk gives a behind-the-scenes retrospective on work associated with GenProg, an early algorithm for automated program repair. In this talk we present lessons learned, good ideas, and thoughts on the future, with an eye toward informing junior researchers about the realities and opportunities of a long-running project. We highlight some notions from the original paper, over a decade ago, that stood the test of time, some that were not as prescient, and some that became more relevant as industrial practice advanced. We place the work in context, highlighting perceptions from software engineering and evolutionary computing, then and now, of how program repair could possibly work. We discuss the importance of measurable benchmarks and reproducible research in bringing scientists together and advancing the area. We give our thoughts on the role of quality requirements and properties in program repair. From testing to metrics to scalability to human factors to technology transfer, software repair touches many aspects of software engineering, and we hope a behind-the-scenes exploration of some of our struggles and successes may benefit researchers pursuing new projects.

About Dr. Westley Weimer

Dr. Westley Weimer is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include reducing the costs and advancing the quality by using both the static and dynamic programming language approaches. His work focuses on automatic or minimally-guided techniques that can scale and be applied to large, existing programs, as well as human aspects to help programmers address defects, understand programs and program correctly. His work has led to over fifteen thousand citations and several awards, including three ‘Humies’ and ICSE 2019 Most Influential paper for his work on automated program repair.

More information about Dr. Weimer can be found on his personal website: https://wes.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw