Development History Granularity Transformations (N)

Abstract

Development histories can simplify some software engineering tasks, butdifferent tasks require different history granularities. For example, a history that includes every edit that resulted in compiling code is needed when searching for the cause of a regression, whereas a history that contains only changes relevant to a feature is needed for understanding the evolution of the feature. Unfortunately, today, both manual and automated history generation result in a single-granularity history. This paper introduces the concept of multi-grained development history views and the architecture of Codebase Manipulation, a tool that automatically records a fine-grained history and manages its granularity by applying granularity transformations.