Treating Run-time Execution History as a First-Class Citizen: Co-Versioning Run-time Behavior alongside Code
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866908976016261120 |
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| author | Kessel, Marcus |
| author_facet | Kessel, Marcus |
| contents | Behavioral Co-Versioning remains absent from mainstream practice: while developers routinely version source code with Git, they rarely persist and query how run-time behavior evolves across revisions. This paper argues that this mismatch contributes to a blind spot in software evolution analysis and CI, where rich execution information is discarded and typically reduced to pass/fail outcomes -- despite partial test oracles, flakiness, and silent output or performance drift. We propose \textit{Behavioral Co-Versioning}, a paradigm that couples the Git history with a \textit{Behavioral Archive}: an append-only, queryable store of selected run-time observations (e.g., method I/O and performance signals) collected during test runs and keyed by commit and test context. This enables semantic diffing, behavior-aware regression localization, and retrospective auditing by querying historical executions, complementing proactive, signal-specific monitoring tools. We first outline a minimal data model and change diagnostics based on code/test/behavior fingerprints, and then demonstrate feasibility with a laptop-scale prototype that replays historical commits of a Python project, archives run-time observations in a local Parquet-backed store, and detects behavioral changes not apparent from textual diffs. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_16933 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Treating Run-time Execution History as a First-Class Citizen: Co-Versioning Run-time Behavior alongside Code Kessel, Marcus Software Engineering Behavioral Co-Versioning remains absent from mainstream practice: while developers routinely version source code with Git, they rarely persist and query how run-time behavior evolves across revisions. This paper argues that this mismatch contributes to a blind spot in software evolution analysis and CI, where rich execution information is discarded and typically reduced to pass/fail outcomes -- despite partial test oracles, flakiness, and silent output or performance drift. We propose \textit{Behavioral Co-Versioning}, a paradigm that couples the Git history with a \textit{Behavioral Archive}: an append-only, queryable store of selected run-time observations (e.g., method I/O and performance signals) collected during test runs and keyed by commit and test context. This enables semantic diffing, behavior-aware regression localization, and retrospective auditing by querying historical executions, complementing proactive, signal-specific monitoring tools. We first outline a minimal data model and change diagnostics based on code/test/behavior fingerprints, and then demonstrate feasibility with a laptop-scale prototype that replays historical commits of a Python project, archives run-time observations in a local Parquet-backed store, and detects behavioral changes not apparent from textual diffs. |
| title | Treating Run-time Execution History as a First-Class Citizen: Co-Versioning Run-time Behavior alongside Code |
| topic | Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16933 |