GenSlice: Generalized Semantic History Slicing

Semantic history slicing addresses the problem of identifying changes related to a particular high-level functionality from the software change histories. Existing solutions are either imprecise, resulting in larger-than-necessary history slices, or inefficient, taking a long time to execute. In this paper, we develop a generalized history slicing framework, named GenSlice, which overcomes the aforementioned limitations. GenSlice abstracts existing history slicing techniques and change history management operations (such as splitting commits into fine-grained changes) as history transformation operators, making it possible to apply them sequentially in various orders. We study and prove properties of various orders of operators and devise a systematic approach for efficiently producing history slices that are optimal for practical purposes. We report on an empirical evaluation of our framework, demonstrating its effectiveness on a set of real-world case studies.