Characterizing Single-Statement Bugs
I spent most of an afternoon last week tracking down a bug caused by having two decorators stacked on a function in the wrong order. The fix was small, but the impact was not. Reading this paper has got me wondering how often this happens—how often it turns out that just one line in a program needs to change to make it right.
Kamienski and colleagues set out to answer two questions: what are the most common single-statement bugs in Python projects, and how do they differ from those in Java projects? After harvesting code from World of Code, they used diffs to identify single-statement fixes.
The paper is here.
