Evaluating Performance of Clone Detection Tools in Detecting Cloned Cochange Candidates

Abstract

Co-change candidates are the group of code fragments that require a change if any of these fragments experience a modification in a commit operation during software evolution. The cloned co-change candidates are a subset of the cochange candidates, and the members in this subset are clones of one another. The cloned co-change candidates are usually created by reusing existing code fragments in a software system. Detecting cloned co-change candidates is essential for clone-tracking, and studies have shown that we can use clone detection tools to find cloned co-change candidates. However, although several studies evaluate clone detection tools for their accuracy in detecting cloned fragments, we found no study that evaluates clone detection tools for detecting cloned co-change candidates. In this study, we explore the dimension of code clone research for detecting cloned co-change candidates. We compare the performance of 12 different configurations of nine promising clone detection tools in identifying cloned co-change candidates from eight open-source C and Java-based subject systems of various sizes and application domains. A ranked list and analysis of the results provides valuable insights and guidelines into selecting and configuring a clone detection tool for identifying co-change candidates and leads to a new dimension of code clone research into change impact analysis.

Evaluating the Performance of Clone Detection Tools in Detecting Cloned Co-change Candidates

“…This paper is a significant extension of our previous work [19] on detecting cloned co-change candidates using different clone detectors. Our previous work answered two research questions by analyzing six clone detectors on six opensource software systems.…”

“…However, no other clone detection tool is included in their study to compare the performance of different clone detection tools in their prediction and ranking technique. We extended our previous study [19] to compare the performance of 12 implementations of nine different clone detection tools based on the performance of detecting cloned co-change candidates using eight software systems written in C and Java programming languages. We found no other study which has performed a similar comparison of clone detectors.…”