A formal approach to undo operations in programming languages
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) - The MIT Press scientific computation series
Tools for supporting the collaborative process
UIST '92 Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
A selective undo mechanism for graphical user interfaces based on command objects
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
User Recovery and Reversal in Interactive Systems
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
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This paper presents a provenance-based approach for supporting undo and redo for software engineers. Writing software entails creating and reworking intricately intertwined software artifacts. After discovering a mistake in an earlier-completed task, a developer may wish to redo this task, but without undoing much of the work done since. Unfortunately, state-of-the-practice undo and redo mechanisms force the developer to manually redo the work completed since the mistake. This can cause considerable extra, often error-prone work. We propose tracking the software engineering process provenance data, and using it to enable (1) undoing tasks by reverting the state of the process execution, (2) revisiting an old task while storing the provenance of undone tasks, and (3) automatically redoing those undone tasks that are consistent with the revision. Our case study of a developer performing a well-understood but complex refactoring demonstrates how our approach can greatly reduce the cost of mistakes made early but discovered late.