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Draft compiled on Monday 23rd March, 2015 at 17: 50 Abstract—Software history is an indispensable artifact for software engineering researchers. Yet we have little knowledge on software developers’ experiences with accessing software history. Without such knowledge, researchers, tool builders, and developers are in the danger of making wrong assumptions and building inadequate tools. In this paper we present the first in-depth, large scale empirical study that looks at the use cases software developers have for accessing software history, the strategies they use to accomplish them, the difficulties they encounter, and the tools and processes that enable their work together with unfulfilled needs. We interviewed 14 experienced software developers from industry in order to shed light on their experiences when accessing software history. We then cross-validated our findings with a survey with 216 participants …