Modeling Software Evolution by Treating History as a First Class Entity

The histories of software systems hold useful information when reasoning about the systems at hand or about general laws of software evolution. Yet, the approaches developed so far do not rely on an explicit meta-model and do not facilitate the comparison of different evolutions. We argue for the need to define history as a first class entity and propose a meta-model centered around the notion of history. We show the usefulness of our a meta-model by discussing the different analysis it enables.