Source Code Patches from Dynamic Analysis

Dynamic analysis can identify improvements to programs that cannot feasibly be identified by static analysis; concurrency improvements are a motivating example. However, mapping these dynamic-analysis-based improvements back to patch-like source-code changes is non-trivial. We describe a system, Scopda, for generating source-code patches for improvements identified by execution-trace-based dynamic analysis. Scopda uses a graph-based static program representation (abstract program graph, APG), containing inter-procedural control flow and local data flow information, to analyse and transform static source-code. We demonstrate Scopda's ability to generate sensible source code patches for Java programs, though it is fundamentally language agnostic.