Treating Run-time Execution History as a First-Class Citizen: Co-Versioning Run-time Behavior alongside Code

arXiv:2604.16933v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: 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.