GitEvo: Code Evolution Analysis for Git Repositories

2026-01-31

AI Summary

Existing tools struggle to support fine-grained analysis of software code evolution effectively. To address this limitation, this work proposes GitEvo—a multilingual, extensible analysis framework that uniquely integrates Git version metadata with syntactic code structures, such as abstract syntax trees (ASTs), enabling deep co-modeling of version history and code structure for the first time. GitEvo facilitates cross-language tracking of code evolution, computation of evolutionary metrics, and interactive visualization. Its effectiveness has been validated on real-world repositories, demonstrating its utility both as a foundation for empirical software engineering research and as an educational platform for understanding the patterns and principles of software evolution.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language
• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation
• Machine Learning: Evolutionary Learning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Analyzing the code evolution of software systems is relevant for practitioners, researchers, and educators. It can help practitioners identify design trends and maintenance challenges, provide researchers with empirical data to study changes over time, and give educators real-world examples that enhance the teaching of software evolution concepts. Unfortunately, we lack tools specifically designed to support code evolution analysis. In this paper, we propose GitEvo, a multi-language and extensible tool for analyzing code evolution in Git repositories. GitEvo leverages Git frameworks and code parsing tools to integrate both Git-level and code-level analysis. We conclude by describing how GitEvo can support the development of novel empirical studies on code evolution and act as a learning tool for educators and students. GitEvo is available at: https://github.com/andrehora/gitevo.

Problem

• code evolution
• Git repositories
• software evolution
• empirical analysis
• development tools

Innovation

• code evolution
• Git repository analysis
• multi-language tool
• empirical software engineering
• software maintenance