Tests suites are a key ingredient in various software automation tasks. Recently, various studies [4] have demonstrated that they are paramount in the adoption of latest innovations in software engineering, such as automated program repair (APR) [3]. Test suites are unfortunately often too scarce in software development projects. Generally, they are provided for regression testing, while new bugs are discovered by users who then describe them informally in bug reports. In recent literature, a new trend of research in APR has attempted to leverage bug reports in generate-and-validate pipelines for program repair. Even in such cases, when an APR tool generates a patch candidate, if test cases are unavailable, developers must manually validate the patch, leading to a threat to validity.
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Plein et al. (2024) studied this question.
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