It appears Facebook has a tool for automatically suggesting bug fixes.
- Facebook has built a tool called Getafix that automatically finds fixes for bugs and offers them to engineers to approve. This allows engineers to work more effectively, and it promotes better overall code quality.
- We believe Getafix is the first tool of its kind to be deployed to production at Facebook scale, contributing to the stability and performance of apps that billions of people use.
- Getafix powers Sapfix, which suggests fixes for bugs that our Sapienz testing tool finds. Getafix also provides fixes for bugs found by Infer, our static testing tool.
- Because Getafix learns from engineers’ past code fixes, its recommendations are intuitive for engineers to review.
- Getafix improves upon previous auto-fix technology by using more powerful techniques for learning fix patterns from past code changes. Getafix uses a more powerful clustering algorithm and also analyzes the context around the particular lines of problematic code to find more appropriate fixes.
I wonder how easy it is to start accepting fixes without properly examining them. I wonder if the time saved in actually coding the fix is irrelevant compared with the time you would otherwise take to find the correct fix.
It will easily fix the obvious symptoms of a bug without addressing the real problem. The illusion of productivity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday December 22 2018, @01:23AM
A few years ago I needed unix file endings support in a certain xml editing software. Unfortunately the maintainer refused my patch saying people would be better off running a script to convert instead. This, despite me trying to explain the issues with hashes and docbooks... Well, I looked up the sources and found the widget library he was using. I opened another github account and pull requested the widget library to support them in the base class by providing two file "samples" and attributing the issue to some codepages mumbo jumbo...
I haven't used that piece of software in years but to this day the guy lists "Unix file endings aren't supported" in an FAQ entry.
compiling...