BUGFIX: towards a common language and framework for the Automatic Program Repair community

Techniques of Automatic Program Repair (APR) have the potential of thoroughly facilitating the task of producing quality software. After a promising start, however, progress in making APR practical has been hindered by the lack of a common framework to support the multiplicity of APR ideas and tools, and of target programming languages and environments. In this position paper we outline a general framework to enable the APR community to benefit from each other’s advances, in particular through a standard language for describing bugs and their fixes. Such a common framework — which is also applicable to work on fault seeding — could be a tremendous benefit to researchers and developers of Interactive Development Environments (IDEs) who are working to make APR an effective part of the software developer’s practical experience.