Eliminating redundancies with a "composition with adaptation" meta-programming technique

Jarzabek, Stan; Li, Shubiao

doi:10.1145/940071.940104

Cited by 42 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Tools and methodologies such as Linked Editing (Toomim et al 2004) should be used to ensure consistent changes are made to all duplicates. Another approach to managing these clones is to create the code at build time using a source code generator (Jarzabek and Shubiao 2003); in this case, the duplicates do not come into existence until the system is being built.…”

Section: Boiler-plating Due To Language Inexpressivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jarzabek et al (Jarzabek and Shubiao 2003) and Basit et al (2005) performed case studies for reducing duplication in the Java buffer classes and the STL. In their studies, they used a meta-language XVCL to reconstruct the code at compile time.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In their studies, they used a meta-language XVCL to reconstruct the code at compile time. (Jarzabek and Shubiao 2003) report that many clones existed because of language limitations and were removed using templates. Basit et al (2005) show that the STL made heavy use of generics to reduce redundant code but redundant code still existed in a form analogous to customization and boiler-plating patterns where operators were modified.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

“Cloning considered harmful” considered harmful: patterns of cloning in software

2008

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Literature on the topic of code cloning often asserts that duplicating code within a software system is a bad practice, that it causes harm to the system's design and should be avoided. However, in our studies, we have found significant evidence that cloning is often used in a variety of ways as a principled engineering tool. For example, one way to evaluate possible new features for a system is to clone the affected subsystems and introduce the new features there, in a kind of sandbox testbed. As features mature and become stable within the experimental subsystems, they can be migrated incrementally into the stable code base; in this way, the risk of introducing instabilities in the stable version is minimized. This paper describes several patterns of cloning that we have observed in our case studies and discusses the advantages and disadvantages associated with using them. We also examine through a case study the frequencies of these clones in two medium-sized open source software systems, the Apache web server and the Gnumeric spreadsheet application. In this study, we found that as many as 71% of the clones could be considered to have a positive impact on the maintainability of the software system.

show abstract

Section: Boiler-plating Due To Language Inexpressivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

“Cloning considered harmful” considered harmful: patterns of cloning in software

2008

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We build generic design solutions with a meta-level method, called XVCL [42], which is capable of unifying both simple and structural clones, even with a wide range of differences among them [4] [18]. With XVCL meta-structures, we would like to unify any similarity patterns whose unification is deemed beneficial from the engineering point of view (e.g., leads to simpler programs that are easier to maintain or reuse due to non-redundancy).…”

Section: Motivation For Clone Minermentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting higher-level similarity patterns in programs

Basit

Jarzabek

2005

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cloning in software systems is known to create problems during software maintenance. Several techniques have been proposed to detect the same or similar code fragments in software, so-called simple clones. While the knowledge of simple clones is useful, detecting design-level similarities in software could ease maintenance even further, and also help us identify reuse opportunities. We observed that recurring patterns of simple clones -so-called structural clones -often indicate the presence of interesting design-level similarities. An example would be patterns of collaborating classes or components. Finding structural clones that signify potentially useful design information requires efficient techniques to analyze the bulk of simple clone data and making non-trivial inferences based on the abstracted information.In this paper, we describe a practical solution to the problem of detecting some basic, but useful, types of design-level similarities such as groups of highly similar classes or files. First, we detect simple clones by applying conventional token-based techniques. Then we find the patterns of co-occurring clones in different files using the Frequent Itemset Mining (FIM) technique. Finally, we perform file clustering to detect those clusters of highly similar files that are likely to contribute to a design-level similarity pattern. The novelty of our approach is application of data mining techniques to detect design level similarities. Experiments confirmed that our method finds many useful structural clones and scales up to big programs. The paper describes our method for structural clone detection, a prototype tool called Clone Miner that implements the method and experimental results.

show abstract

“…Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior [14]. By making refactoring efforts on a set of code clones, they can be merged into a method [8,6,15], a component [19], or an aspect [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simultaneous Modification Support based on Code Clone Analysis

Higo¹,

Ueda²,

Kusumoto³

et al. 2007

14th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'07)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Maintaining software systems becomes more difficult as their size and complexity increase. One factor that makes software maintenance more difficult is the presence of code clones. A code clone is defined as a code fragment occurring more than once in identical or similar form into a software system. For example, the presence of code clones is a big factor of overlooking some places that should be modified simultaneously. One technique that helps the number of code clones is Refactoring. There are several research efforts that provide support to refactor code clones, but unfortunately some code clones cannot or should not be refactored (ex. stereotyped process, absence of abstraction functionality, performance enhancement). In order to support maintaining the consistency among code clones, we propose a simultaneous modification support method. Given a software system, firstly, a maintainer identifies a code fragment that must be modified. Then, only the code clones between the identified code fragment and the source files of the software system are detected. We developed a simultaneous modification support tool, Libra, and applied it to open source software systems. The results showed that Libra was a good searching tool as much as grep, which is a useful tool of UNIX.

show abstract

Eliminating redundancies with a "composition with adaptation" meta-programming technique

Cited by 42 publications

References 15 publications

“Cloning considered harmful” considered harmful: patterns of cloning in software

“Cloning considered harmful” considered harmful: patterns of cloning in software

Detecting higher-level similarity patterns in programs

Simultaneous Modification Support based on Code Clone Analysis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About