John Henry the Maintenance Programmer

Thanks to Bulkan Evcimen for tweeting about an article I doubt I would have found otherwise: “A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair” (pdf link here), by  Stephanie Forrest et al. They describe there how they fed a genetic programming algorithm the following inputs:

1. Source code with a known defect
2. A negative test case
3. Several positive test cases

The authors show how software with the genetic algorithm is capable of repairing the defect such that the software under test no longer fails, while it still passes the positive test cases. They complete the activity with additional software that reviews the change and reduces its scope to the minimum.

Is this the end of the maintenance programmer? If so, this time there would be a happy ending: John Henry lives, and goes on to be a railroad engineer.

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