A human study of patch maintainability

11 years 6 months ago

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Identifying and ﬁxing defects is a crucial and expensive part of the software lifecycle. Measuring the quality of bug-ﬁxing patches is a difﬁcult task that affects both functional correctness and the future maintainability of the code base. Recent research interest in automatic patch generation makes a systematic understanding of patch maintainability and understandability even more critical. We present a human study involving over 150 participants, 32 real-world defects, and 40 distinct patches. In the study, humans perform tasks that demonstrate their understanding of the control ﬂow, state, and maintainability aspects of code patches. As a baseline we use both human-written patches that were later reverted and also patches that have stood the test of time to ground our results. To address any potential lack of readability with machine-generated patches, we propose a system wherein such patches are augmented with synthesized, human-readable documentation that summarizes thei...

Zachary P. Fry, Bryan Landau, Westley Weimer

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