Distinguishing copies from originals in software clones

Krinke, Jens; Gold, Nicolas; Jia, Yunyi; Binkley, David

doi:10.1145/1808901.1808907

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The last change date information from version control systems has been used by Krinke et al [15,16] to compare the history of clone pairs and distinguish the original from the copied code. Their approach is able to do the distinction for the majority of clone pairs even between different projects (they analyzed the subprojects of the GNOME Desktop Suite).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

Krinke

2011

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Clones

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It is still a debated question whether cloned code causes increased maintenance efforts. If cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code, i.e. it is changed less often, it will require less maintenance efforts. The more stable cloned code is, the longer it will not have been changed, so the stability can be estimated through the code's age. This paper presents a study on the average age of cloned code.For three large open source systems, the age of every line of source code is computed as the date of the last change in that line. In addition, every line is categorized whether it belongs to cloned code as detected by a clone detector. The study shows that on average, cloned code is older than non-cloned code. Moreover, if a file has cloned code, the average age of the cloned code of the file is lower than the average age of the non-cloned code in the same file. The results support the previous findings that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

Krinke

2011

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Clones

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“…• It extends previous work [19] to automatically distinguish between copy and original by allowing the clones of a clone pair to be in different systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…Most of the above empirical studies use version control systems to extract limited information about the originals and their copied clones; for example, when a clone appears in some previous version. However, so far there has been only two approaches [18], [19] to distinguish originals from copies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cloning and copying between GNOME projects

Krinke

Gold

Jia

et al. 2010

2010 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010)

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Abstract-This paper presents an approach to automatically distinguish the copied clone from the original in a pair of clones. It matches the line-by-line version information of a clone to the pair's other clone. A case study on the GNOME Desktop Suite revealed a complex flow of reused code between the different subprojects. In particular, it showed that the majority of larger clones (with a minimal size of 28 lines or higher) exist between the subprojects and more than 60% of the clone pairs can be automatically separated into original and copy.

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“…German et al [37] used CCFinder to detect code siblings reused across FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux kernels, and then investigated the source code repositories of the projects to identify the original project of a code sibling. Krinke et al [38] proposed to distinguish copies from originals by comparing timestamps of code fragments recorded in source code repositories. Krinke et al [39] used the approach and visualized source code reuse among GNOME Desktop Suite projects.…”

Section: B Origin Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Research Artifact: The Potential of Meta-Maintenance on GitHub

Hata

Kula

Ishio

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)

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Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of meta-maintenance-i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance. Our results indicate that a majority of active repositories on GitHub contains at least one file which is also present in another repository, and that a significant minority of these files are maintained differently in the different repositories which contain them. We manually analyzed a representative sample of shared files and their variants to understand which changes might be useful for meta-maintenance. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance and open up avenues for future work to capitalize on this potential.

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Distinguishing copies from originals in software clones

Cited by 15 publications

References 28 publications

Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

Cloning and copying between GNOME projects

Research Artifact: The Potential of Meta-Maintenance on GitHub

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