Unix diff command shows the difference between two text files as a set of added and deleted hunks. It is not obvious that such hunks are really additions and deletions performed by a developer, as some of them could be the changed version of another. The linediff tool is a perl script that finds such changed lines by using a two step algorithm based on coarse and fine grained similarity measures.

download (from SourceForge): ldiff.pl

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Jimpa, i.e. Java-impact, is an Eclipse plug-in which identifies the impacted source code from a given change request. The approach implemented in Jimpa starts from a textual description of a change request and exploits information retrieval algorithms to link such description with the set of historical source file revisions impacted by similar past change requests.

Eclipse update site: http://rcost.unisannio.it/cerulo/jimpa
doc: README

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xmlDiff is an algorithm implemented in Java that computes the similarity between two XML documents considering their maximum common XML subtrees. The output is a measure which consider separately the content, structure, and positional similarity.

download: xmldiff.tgz

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