LSdiff: A program differencing tool to identify systematic structural differences

Abstract

Program differencing tools such as GNU diff identify individual differences but do not determine how those differences are related to each other. For example, an extract superclass refactoring on several subclasses will be represented by diff as a scattered collection of line additions and deletions which must be manually pieced together. In our previous work, we developed LSdiff, a novel program differencing technique that automatically identifies systematic structural differences as logic rules. This paper presents an LSdiff Eclipse plug-in that provides a summary of systematic structural differences along with textual differences within an Eclipse integrated development environment. This plugin provides several additional features to allow developers to interpret LSdiff rules easily, to select the abstraction level of program differencing analysis, and to reduce its running time through incremental program analysis. © 2010 ACM.