Towards developer-centered automatic program repair: findings from Bloomberg

• DOI: 10.1145/3540250.3558953
• Publication Date: 2022-11-09T20:46:22Z
• Authors: Emily Rowan Winter; Vesna Nowack; David Bowes; Steve Counsell; Tracy Hall; Sæmundur Haraldsson; John Woodward; Serkan Kirbas; Etienne Windels; Olayori McBello; Abdurahman Atakis...; Kevin Kells; Matthew Pagano
• Keywords: automatic program repair; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; human factors; qualitative methods

Acknowledgements: We are very grateful to the Bloomberg developers who participated in our focus groups and gave of their time and expertise. This paper reports on qualitative research into automatic program repair (APR) at Bloomberg. Six focus groups were conducted with a total of seventeen participants (including both developers of the APR tool and developers using the tool) to consider: the development at Bloomberg of a prototype APR tool (Fixie); developers’ early experiences using the tool; and developers’ perspectives on how they would like to interact with the tool in future. APR is developing rapidly and it is important to understand in greater detail developers' experiences using this emerging technology. In this paper, we provide in-depth, qualitative data from an industrial setting. We found that the development of APR at Bloomberg had become increasingly user-centered, emphasising how fixes were presented to developers, as well as particular features, such as customisability. From the focus groups with developers who had used Fixie, we found particular concern with the pragmatic aspects of APR, such as how and when fixes were presented to them. Based on our findings, we make a series of recommendations to inform future APR development, highlighting how APR tools should 'start small', be customisable, and fit with developers' workflows. We also suggest that APR tools should capitalise on the promise of repair bots and draw on advances in explainable AI. This work was supported by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant (EP/S005730/1).