Automatic Program Repair

Programming mistakes of all kinds-in source code, configurations, tests, or other artifacts-are a wide-ranging and expensive problem. Developers dedicate a significant proportion of engineering time and effort to finding and fixing bugs in their code, businesses lose market share when vulnerabilities in the software they sell impact customers, and overall productivity is impacted by software that does not work as intended or is prone to vulnerabilities.1 Rapidly finding and fixing bugs and vulnerabilities only grows in importance as software is continuously evolving and deployed and as society becomes increasingly dependent on software systems in all aspects of modern life. Speaking to this general problem, this special issue of IEEE Software addresses recent advances in research and practice in automatic software repair.