Described herein is a computer implemented method for simplifying a hierarchical edit script comprising nodes describing operations which can be applied to dataset A to generate dataset B. The method comprises identifying nodes in the hierarchical edit script that can potentially be simplified and forming one or more node groups, each node group comprising one or more sibling nodes from the hierarchical edit script that are of a same node type and that can potentially be simplified. For each node group the method further comprises identifying a node group type based on a type the node or nodes in the node group, based on the node group type, processing the node group to generate a single node, the single node capturing the operations described by the node or nodes in the node group, and replacing the node group in the hierarchical edit script with the single node.