Reasoning over the Evolution of Source Code Using Quantified Regular Path Expressions

Version control systems (VCS) have become indispensable to develop software. Next to their immediate advantages, they also offer information about the evolution of software and its development process. Despite this wealth of information, it has only been leveraged by tools that are dedicated to a specific software engineering task such as predicting bugs or identifying hotspots. General-purpose tool support for reasoning about the information contained in a version control system is limited. In this paper, we introduce the logic-based program query language ABSINTHE. It supports querying versioned software systems using logic queries in which quantified regular path expressions are embedded. These expressions lend themselves to specifying the properties that each individual version in a sequence of successive software versions ought to exhibit.