Cloning by accident: an empirical study of source code cloning across software systems

Al-Ekram, Raihan; Kapser, Cory; Holt, Richard C.; Godfrey, Michael W.

doi:10.1109/isese.2005.1541846

Cited by 54 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Other than clones, redundancies-e.g., redundant assignments, conditionals, or dead code-can be the cause of errors, as shown by Xie and Engler [43]. As reported by Al-Ekram et al [1] it also happens that, in some cases, the similarity between source code fragments occurs "by accident", since different developers solve similar problems in the same way. Our study shares with them the evidence that, in most cases, a large portion of the "inconsistent" clone changes is due to an independent evolution.…”

Section: Empirical Studies On the Presence And Evolution Of Clonesmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…The project started in January 2000 and quickly reached a good level of maturity. The total number of snapshots extracted from the CVS repository is 2, 548, and clone detection has been performed on snapshot 1,234 which corresponds to release 2.9.9. Clone evolution was studied on the remaining 1,314 snapshots.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The total number of snapshots extracted from the CVS repository is 2, 548, and clone detection has been performed on snapshot 1,234 which corresponds to release 2.9.9. Clone evolution was studied on the remaining 1,314 snapshots. PostgreSQL 4 is an open source relational database system implemented in ANSI C and running on a wide number of operating systems.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

et al. 2009

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Code cloning has been very often indicated as a bad software development practice. However, many studies appearing in the literature indicate that this is not always the case. In fact, either changes occurring in cloned code are consistently propagated, or cloning is used as a sort of templating strategy, where cloned source code fragments evolve independently. This paper (i) proposes an automatic approach to classify the evolution of source code clone fragments, and (ii) reports a fine-grained analysis of clone evolution in four different Java and C software systems, aimed at investigating to what extent clones are consistently propagated or they evolve independently. Also, the paper investigates the relationship between the presence of clone evolution patterns and other characteristics such as clone raSuresh Thummalapenta North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA E-mail: sthumma@ncsu.edu Luigi Cerulo, Lerina Aversano, Massimiliano Di Penta Department of Engineering -University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy E-mail: lcerulo@unisannio.it, aversano@unisannio.it, dipenta@unisannio.it 2 dius, clone size and the kind of change the clones underwent, i.e., corrective maintenance or enhancement.

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Section: Empirical Studies On the Presence And Evolution Of Clonesmentioning

confidence: 76%

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

et al. 2009

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“…Al-Ekram et al [3] have also conducted a promising empirical study on cloning, focussing on C/C++ systems from two different domains. They examined different clone types (e.g., accidental clones) by analyzing clones across systems in the same domain, whereas we have studied a wide variety of systems and concentrated on copy/paste function clones of individual system.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of Function Clones in Open Source Software

Roy

Cordy

2008

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

104

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The new hybrid clone detection tool NICAD combines the strengths and overcomes the limitations of both textbased and AST-based clone detection techniques to yield highly accurate identification of cloned code in software systems. In this paper, we present a first empirical study of function clones in open source software using NICAD. We examine more than 15 open source C and Java systems, including the entire Linux Kernel and Apache httpd, and analyze their use of cloned code in several different dimensions, including language, clone size, clone location and clone density by proportion of cloned functions. We manually verify all detected clones and provide a complete catalogue of different clones in an online repository in a variety of formats. These validated results can be used as a cloning reference for these systems and as a benchmark for evaluating other clone detection tools.

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“…Despite the higher probability of a required functionality being available, the increasing effort for searching, understanding and adapting a reusable incites implementing functionality from scratch [3], [18]. (2) The use of established protocols might impose specific implementation steps that are duplicated [1]. (3) To achieve business goals, duplicate implementations might be necessary at times.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Approach to Detect Unintentional Re-implementations

Bauer

Jürgens²

2014

2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

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Abstract-Unintentional re-implementation of existing functionality is an issue frequently reported in practice and causes increased efforts for development and maintenance. However, instances are hard to find with existing approaches. For practitioners, this increases maintenance risks, such as inconsistent bug fixing, and hinders quality improvement efforts. For researchers, this hinders a reliable quantification of the issue.We propose a pragmatic approach combining identifierbased concept location with static analysis to detect candidate re-implementations between two sets of source code. We present initial results from applying the approach to detect reimplementations of utility functionality present in libraries within a sample of Java projects.

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Cloning by accident: an empirical study of source code cloning across software systems

Cited by 54 publications

References 18 publications

An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

An Empirical Study of Function Clones in Open Source Software

A Novel Approach to Detect Unintentional Re-implementations

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