an editing-operation replayer with highlights supporting investigation of program modifications
In editing source code of a program on modern integrated development environments, automated recording of editing operations has become popular. These operations enable past program modifications to be investigated in detail. However, such investigation of enormous amount of operations is troublesome for a human. Moreover, each of the recorded operations does not indicate what code changes were totally done. To address these problems, this paper proposes OperationReplayer, which replays recorded operations in chronological order and arbitrarily restores past snapshots of source code. It employs a plug-in mechanism that allows its user to flexibly highlight particular operations in their visualization. This mechanism provides the user with various overviews of vast operations and alleviates burden on his/her investigation. The paper also shows three case studies of effective examinations using highlight plug-ins.
integrated development environments visualization software evolution fine-grained changes editing patterns