On the “Naturalness” of Buggy Code

Baishakhi Ray, Vincent Hellendoorn, Saheel Godhane, Zhaopeng Tu, Alberto Bacchelli, Premkumar Devanbu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

150 Citations (Scopus)
137 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this naturalness of software through statistical models and used them to good effect in suggestion engines, porting tools, coding standards checkers, and idiom miners. This suggests that code that appears improbable, or surprising, to a good statistical language model is "unnatural" in some sense, and thus possibly suspicious. In this paper, we investigate this hypothesis. We consider a large corpus of bug fix commits (ca. 7,139), from 10 different Java projects, and focus on its language statistics, evaluating the naturalness of buggy code and the corresponding fixes. We find that code with bugs tends to be more entropic (i.e. unnatural), becoming less so as bugs are fixed. Ordering files for inspection by their average entropy yields cost-effectiveness scores comparable to popular defect prediction methods. At a finer granularity, focusing on highly entropic lines is similar in cost-effectiveness to some well-known static bug finders (PMD, FindBugs) and ordering warnings from these bug finders using an entropy measure improves the cost-effectiveness of inspecting code implicated in warnings. This suggests that entropy may be a valid, simple way to complement the effectiveness of PMD or FindBugs, and that search-based bug-fixing methods may benefit from using entropy both for fault-localization and searching for fixes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, ICSE 2016
Place of PublicationLos Alamitos, CA
PublisherIEEE
Pages428-439
Number of pages12
Volume1
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-3900-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 May 2016
Event2016 IEEE/ACM 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2016 - Austin, United States
Duration: 14 May 201622 May 2016

Conference

Conference2016 IEEE/ACM 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAustin
Period14/05/1622/05/16

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