# The Impact of Systematic Edits in History Slicing

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how systematic edits affect commit history slicing and demonstrates that splitting such commits can significantly reduce the size of extracted histories, improving efficiency.

## Contribution

It introduces a method to split systematic edit commits to eliminate unnecessary dependencies, reducing history slice sizes in open source projects.

## Key findings

- History slices reduced by 13.3-57.2% after splitting systematic edits.
- Splitting systematic commits improves the precision of history slicing.
- Empirical evidence from open source projects supports the effectiveness of the approach.

## Abstract

While extracting a subset of a commit history, specifying the necessary portion is a time-consuming task for developers. Several commit-based history slicing techniques have been proposed to identify dependencies between commits and to extract a related set of commits using a specific commit as a slicing criterion. However, the resulting subset of commits become large if commits for systematic edits whose changes do not depend on each other exist. We empirically investigated the impact of systematic edits on history slicing. In this study, commits in which systematic edits were detected are split between each file so that unnecessary dependencies between commits are eliminated. In several histories of open source systems, the size of history slices was reduced by 13.3-57.2% on average after splitting the commits for systematic edits.