Research on Software Repair Earns FSE Test of Time Award Honorable Mention
Content
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) alumnus Edward K. Smith ’16MS, along with collaborators Earl T. Barr (University College London), Claire Le Goues (Carnegie Mellon University), and CICS Professor Yuriy Brun, have received a 2025 ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) Test of Time Award honorable mention. Their 2015 paper, titled "Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease? Overfitting in Automated Program Repair," was recognized for pioneering research on overfitting in program repair.
Automated program repair techniques attempt to repair software bugs using tests. Their paper showed that such techniques frequently produce patches that appear to solve the problem but actually overfit to the tests, inadvertently introducing new errors and breaking other, undertested functionality. Smith and colleagues developed a novel methodology for objectively assessing overfitting and identifying misleading patches, significantly altering the path of subsequent research into automated program repair, steering it toward reducing overfitting.
"This phenomenon of making a program pass tests but not actually fixing the underlying bug can be dangerous if developers assume the repair tool is correct," explained Brun. "Today, automated programming assistants driven by large language models are becoming ubiquitous, but all these tools can suffer from the overfitting problem. Our methodology is widely used today by researchers in the field, and a large body of work has focused specifically on decreasing overfitting in automated program repair."
The FSE Test of Time Award, established in 2018, honors papers from ten years prior that have demonstrated enduring influence within the software engineering research community and in industry. According to Google Scholar, the paper has received over 400 citations.
Smith and his collaborators will be formally recognized at the 33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, scheduled for June 23-28, 2025, in Trondheim, Norway.
