Abstract
The development of precision grammars is an inherently resource-intensive process; their complexity means that changes made to one area of a grammar often introduce unexpected flow-on effects elsewhere in the grammar which may only be discovered after some time has been invested in updating numerous test suite items. In this paper, we present the browser-based gDelta tool, which aims to provide grammar engineers with more immediate feedback on the impact of changes made to a grammar by comparing parser output from two different grammar versions. We describe an attribute weighting algorithm for highlighting components of the grammar that have been strongly impacted by a modification to the grammar, as well as a technique for clustering test suite items whose parsability has changed, in order to locate related groups of effects. These two techniques are used to present the grammar engineer with different views on the grammar to inform them of different aspects of change in a data-driven manner.
Published Version
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