RT Conference Proceedings
T1 History Slicing: Assisting Code-Evolution Tasks.
A1 Servant-Cortés, Francisco Javier
A1 Jones, James A.
K1 Ingeniería del software
K1 Soporte lógico
AB Many software-engineering tasks require developers to understand the history and evolution of source code. However, today’s software-development techniques and tools are not well suited for the easy and efficient procurement of such information. In this paper, we present an approach called history slicing that can automatically identify a minimal number of code modifications, across any number of revisions, for any arbitrary segment of source code at fine granularity. We also present our implementation of history slicing, Chronos, that includes a novel visualization of the entire evolution for the code of interest. We provide two experiments: one experiment automatically computes 16,000 history slices to determine the benefit brought by various levels of automation, and another experiment that assesses the practical implications of history slicing for actual developers using the technique for actual software-maintenancetasks that involve code evolution. The experiments show that history slicing offered drastic improvements over the conventional techniques in three ways: (1) the amount of information needed to be examined and traced by developers was reduced by up to three orders of magnitude; (2) the correctness of developers attempting to solve software-maintenance tasks was more than doubled; and (3) the time to completion of these software-maintenance tasks was almost halved.
PB Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
YR 2012
FD 2012
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34839
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34839
LA eng
NO Francisco Servant and James A. Jones. 2012. History slicing: assisting code-evolution tasks. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY , USA, Article 43, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/2393596.2393646
NO https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess#h-green-open-access
NO Correo 25/10/24
NO This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award CCF-1116943, and by a Google Research Award.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 20 ene 2026