Semantic Slicing of Software Version Histories

Yi Li, Julia Rubin, and Marsha Chechik

In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2015

Abstract: Software developers often need to transfer functionality, e.g., a set of commits implementing a new feature or a bug fix, from one branch of a configuration management system to another. That can be a challenging task as the existing configuration management tools lack support for matching high-level semantic functionality with low-level version histories. The developer thus has to either manually identify the exact set of semantically-related commits implementing the functionality of interest or sequentially port a specific subset of the change history, “inheriting” additional, unwanted functionality. In this paper, we tackle this problem by providing automated support for identifying the set of semantically-related commits implementing a particular functionality, which is defined by a set of tests. We refer to our approach, CSLICER, as semantic slicing of version histories. We formally define the semantic slicing problem, provide an algorithm for identifying a set of commits that constitute a slice, and instantiate it in a specific implementation for Java projects managed in Git. We evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of our approach on a set of open-source software repositories. We show that it allows to identify subsets of change histories that maintain the functionality of interest but are substantially smaller than the original ones.

Cite:

@inproceedings{Li2015SSS,
  author = {Li, Yi and Rubin, Julia and Chechik, Marsha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)},
  month = nov,
  pages = {686--696},
  title = {Semantic Slicing of Software Version Histories},
  year = {2015}
}