Eclipse Repairnator comes from research activities in the area of automated bug fixing. These activities have been performed in the last 8 years with PhD students and collaborators at the University of Lille, Inria, University of Valenciennes, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and others. Those techniques have now reached a maturity level to start being transferred to the software industry.
The scope of the Eclipse Repairnator project is to transfer academic results in the domain of intelligent continuous integration (“AI for CI”) to industry.
Eclipse Repairnator is an intelligent bot for continuous integration: it suggests fixes for bugs and missing tests for quality assurance. Repairnator is artificial intelligence for continuous integration: “AI for CI“. Repairnator is an open-source software project, resulting from years of academic research in the field of software engineering.
Reparinator started as an open source project on GitHub. By becoming an Eclipse project, we expect that it will grow and mature with contributions from multiple companies and research groups.
Repairnator is visible, there have been press articles about Repairnator in 12+ more different languages: https://github.com/Spirals-Team/repairnator/issues/771
Eclipse Repairnator is a natural fit in the Eclipse Foundation. First, it is a software engineering and software engineering has always been a key aspect of the Eclipse ecosystem. Second, it is an open-innovation project involving both industry and academia, which is also a specialty of the foundation.
Joining the Eclipse Foundation will be a key enabler for open-innovation done in an appropriate collaboration structure (from an IP and from a legal perspective).
Repairnator will bring to the Eclipse Foundation strong ties with the Swedish industry and with the software engineering research community.
The double licensing scheme is proposed in order to be the least disruptive. In the project, we take a lot of care regarding continuity and compatibility: what worked yesterday (license, API), should still work today.
Q1 2019: join Eclipse with an initial consortium
Q2 2019: ramp up software development
Q3 2019: first industrial results
Q4 2019: Release of version 1.0
There are currently 4 PhD theses directly related to Repairnator, funded by the European Commission, the Wallenberg foundation, and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. The outcome of this constant research work will feed the Repairnator project in the mid and the long term.