HotBugs.jar: A Benchmark of Hot Fixes for Time-Critical Bugs

2025-10-08

AI Summary

Hot fixes lack dedicated evaluation benchmarks, hindering progress in automated debugging and system resilience research. To address this gap, we introduce HotBugs.jar—the first benchmark dataset for hot fixes grounded in real-world production environments. Systematically mined from over 190,000 commits using Jira issue logs, it comprises 679 manually validated hot-fix instances, of which 110 are accompanied by reproducible test cases. Built upon the Bugs.jar framework, HotBugs.jar provides paired buggy and patched program versions, corresponding test suites, and structured metadata. This dataset fills a critical void in the field, enabling rigorous, reproducible, and practically relevant evaluation of hot-fix techniques. It has been officially adopted as the benchmark for the SBSE 2025 Challenge, significantly enhancing the verifiability, reproducibility, and practical utility of hot-fix research.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning
• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Hot fixes are urgent, unplanned changes deployed to production systems to address time-critical issues. Despite their importance, no existing evaluation benchmark focuses specifically on hot fixes. We present HotBugs.jar, the first dataset dedicated to real-world hot fixes. From an initial mining of 10 active Apache projects totaling over 190K commits and 150K issue reports, we identified 746 software patches that met our hot-fix criteria. After manual evaluation, 679 were confirmed as genuine hot fixes, of which 110 are reproducible using a test suite. Building upon the Bugs.jar framework, HotBugs.jar integrates these 110 reproducible cases and makes available all 679 manually validated hot fixes, each enriched with comprehensive metadata to support future research. Each hot fix was systematically identified using Jira issue data, validated by independent reviewers, and packaged in a reproducible format with buggy and fixed versions, test suites, and metadata. HotBugs.jar has already been adopted as the official challenge dataset for the Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) Conference Challenge Track, demonstrating its immediate impact. This benchmark enables the study and evaluation of tools for rapid debugging, automated repair, and production-grade resilience in modern software systems to drive research in this essential area forward.

Problem

• Lack of benchmark for hot fixes in software systems
• Need for reproducible dataset of urgent production patches
• Enables evaluation of rapid debugging and repair tools

Innovation

• First dataset dedicated to real-world hot fixes
• Systematically identified using Jira issue data
• Packaged with buggy and fixed versions and metadata