FAPR: Fast and Accurate Program Repair for Introductory Programming Courses

Abstract: In introductory programming courses, it is challenging for instructors to provide debugging feedback on students' incorrect programs. Some recent tools automatically offer program repair feedback by identifying any differences between incorrect and correct programs, but suffer from issues related to scalability, accuracy, and cross-language portability. This paper presents FAPR -- our novel approach that suggests repairs based on program differences in a fast and accurate manner. FAPR is different from current tools in three aspects. First, it encodes syntactic information into token sequences to enable high-speed comparison between incorrect and correct programs. Second, to accurately extract program differences, FAPR adopts a novel matching algorithm that maximizes token-level matches and minimizes statement-level differences. Third, FAPR relies on testing instead of static/dynamic analysis to validate and refine candidate repairs, so it eliminates the language dependency or high runtime overhead incurred by complex program analysis. We implemented FAPR to suggest repairs for both C and C++ programs; our experience shows the great cross-language portability of FAPR. More importantly, we empirically compared FAPR with a state-of-the-art tool Clara. FAPR suggested repairs for over 95.5% of incorrect solutions. We sampled 250 repairs among FAPR's suggestions, and found 89.6% of the samples to be minimal and correct. FAPR outperformed Clara by suggesting repairs for more cases, creating smaller repairs, producing higher-quality fixes, and causing lower runtime overheads. Our results imply that FAPR can potentially help instructors or TAs to effectively locate bugs in incorrect code, and to provide debugging hints/guidelines based on those generated repairs.