Abstract:Automatic program repair helps developers reduce the cost of manual bug fixing. Approaches to test-suite based repair aim to generate code patches to pass the test suite as well as maintain the program execution. This paper reviews available literature on test-suite based repair and report the progress in two directions:Approaches to automatic repair and empirical foundations. First, existing approaches to automatic repair are described in three categories:Search based, exhaustion based, and constraint-solving based patch generation. Second, empirical foundations on repair are detailed, including the argumentation in the research field. Related techniques are then briefly introduced as the supplementation of program repair. Finally, opportunities and challenges are presented to summarize this review.