A change-aware development environment by recording editing operations of source code

Understanding a program and its evolution is not satisfied only by looking at a current snapshot of its source code. Thus, a developer often examines a sequence of its snapshots stored in repositories of versioning systems, and identifies differences between two successive snapshots. Unfortunately, such differences do not represent individual changes of the source code. This paper proposes a mechanism for recording all editing operations a developer has applied to source code on an integrated development environment. The paper also shows a running implementation of the mechanism built as an Eclipse plug-in, which is called OperationRecorder. The experimental results with a small-scale program substantiate that it has a practical use from the viewpoint of its performance.

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