ASTOR: Evolutionary Automatic Software Repair for Java

Abstract: Context: During last years, many automatic software repair approaches have been presented by the software engineering research community. According to the corresponding papers, these approaches are able to repair real defects from open source projects. Problematic: Some previous publications in the automatic repair field do not provide the implementation of theirs approaches. Consequently, it is not possible for the research community to re-execute the original evaluation, to set up new evaluations (for example, to evaluate the performance against new defects) or to compare approaches against each others. Solution: We propose a publicly available automatic software repair tool called Astor. It implements three state-of-the-art automatic software repair approaches in the context of Java programs (including GenProg and a subset of PAR's templates). The source code of Astor is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL v2).