Automatically suggesting fixes for JavaScript bugs

What is it about?

JavaScript is the de facto language for the web, especially at the client-side. This popularity is not too surprising, given the flexibility that JavaScript provides developers. However, this flexibility also tends to make programming with JavaScript prone to bugs. In a previous study, we found that the majority these bugs are related in some way to the interact of JavaScript code with the Document Object Model (DOM), which is an object that contains the HTML elements on the page (including what you see on the browser screen) and the hierarchical relation between those elements. In this paper, we introduce an approach to automatically suggest fixes for such “DOM-related” JavaScript bugs, and we have created a prototype tool called Vejovis to demonstrate its feasibility and usefulness.

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Why is it important?

Not only is JavaScript the de facto language of the web, but it is also one of the most popular programming languages, according to recent surveys from GitHub and Stack Overflow. In addition, while there are many general-purpose tools that can be used to automatically find fixes for software bugs, JavaScript’s loose nature makes it less amenable to traditional approaches, both static and dynamic. Our approach shows that an automated repair approach with high accuracy can be achieved for an important class of JavaScript bugs.