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posted by martyb on Saturday December 22 2018, @12:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the Code-mangling dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday December 22 2018, @06:43PM (1 child)

    by acid andy (1683) on Saturday December 22 2018, @06:43PM (#777613) Homepage Journal

    Yeah that's right when you get to go-live. But at the other end of the scale, if your self-imposed deadlines are too flexible (or non-existent) and your goals are too lofty, the thing might never reach alpha even--that's how to make vaporware. I'm not suggesting for a moment that that's an issue for you BTW. Just idle musings.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 22 2018, @07:18PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday December 22 2018, @07:18PM (#777622) Homepage Journal

    I'm not suggesting for a moment that that's an issue for you BTW.

    You'd better not be. I'd have to laugh at you. You've been around here plenty long enough to know that I have no problem at all pushing bugs live.

    <mork>Humor, ar-ar!</mork>

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