IDiff: Interaction-based program differencing tool

Abstract

When a software system evolves, its program entities such as classes/methods are also changed. System comprehension, maintenance, and other tasks require the detection of the changed entities between two versions. However, existing differencing tools are file-based and cannot handle well the common cases in which the methods/classes are reordered/moved or even renamed/modified. Moreover, many tools show the program changes at the text line level. In this demo, we present iDiff, a program differencing tool that is able to display the changes to classes/methods between two versions and to track the corresponding classes/methods even they were reordered/moved/renamed and/or modified. The key idea is that during software evolution, an entity could change its location, name, order, and even its internal implementation. However, its interaction with other entities would be more stable. iDiff represents a system at a version as an attributed graph, in which the nodes represent program entities, the edges represent the interactions between the nodes. Entities between two versions are matched via an incremental matching algorithm, which takes into account the similarity of interactions for matching. The differences of two versions of the entire system including its program entities are detected based on the matched entities.