Untangling Source Code Changes Using Program Slicing

Version control systems (VCS) are widely used to manage the history of code bases. These histories in turn provide opportunities for research. Researchers expect the commits in these version control systems to be atomic. That is, each commit performs one task. This is however not always the case. To remedy this, we propose a commit untangling technique using program slicing. In particular, we posit that all related changes are part of the same program slice. To do so, we perform program slicing on changes. Preliminary results using intra-procedural slicing have proven to be encouraging. We are currently working on expanding our work to be inter-procedural.