Facebook Creates an AI-Based Tool To Automate Bug Fixes (siliconangle.com)

Facebook is trying to speed up the time it takes to roll out new software updates and debug any issues in them with a new tool called SapFix that its engineers are building. From a report: SapFix, which is still under development, is designed to generate fixes automatically for specific bugs before sending them to human engineers for approval. Facebook, which announced the tool today ahead of its Scale conference in San Jose, California, for developers building large-scale systems and applications, calls SapFix an "AI hybrid tool." It uses artificial intelligence to automate the creation of fixes for bugs that have been identified by its software testing tool Sapienz, which is already being used in production. SapFix will eventually be able to operate independently from Sapienz, but for now it's still a proof-of-concept that relies on the latter tool to pinpoint bugs first of all. SapFix can fix bugs in a number of ways, depending on how complex they are, Facebook engineers Yue Jia, Ke Mao and Mark Harman wrote in a blog post announcing the tools. For simpler bugs, SapFix creates patches that revert the code submission that introduced them. In the case of more complicated bugs, SapFix uses a collection of "templated fixes" that were created by human engineers based on previous bug fixes.

Comments

Re:With bugs like these. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Please open source this. We need this.

Seriously, most of our bugs are due to bug fixes. A lot of those problems can be caught by using TDD if you write a test first that fails then passes after your change, but I've been almost fired twice for insisting we do TDD. Yes, it takes longer in the short-term, but I think it wastes less time in the long term, especially when you're testing against APIs.