Frontiers of software clone management

Koschke, Rainer

doi:10.1109/fosm.2008.4659255

Cited by 39 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…Software cloning-duplication and reuse with or without modifications-has seen active research in the last decade [19], both in the context of single systems development and software product lines. We now discuss such related work.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

Dubinsky

Rubin

Berger

et al. 2013

2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

226

103

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Abstract-Many companies develop software product linescollections of similar products-by cloning and adapting artifacts of existing product variants. Transforming such cloned product variants into a "single-copy" software product line representation is considered an important software re-engineering activity, as reflected in numerous tools and methodologies available. However, development practices of companies that use cloning to implement product lines have not been systematically studied. This lack of empirical knowledge threatens the validity and applicability of approaches supporting the transformation, and impedes adoption of advanced solutions for systematic software reuse. It also hinders the attempts to improve the solutions themselves.We address this gap with an empirical study conducted to investigate the cloning culture in six industrial software product lines realized via code cloning. Our study investigates the processes, and the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the approach. We observe that cloning, while widely discouraged in literature, is still perceived as a favorable and natural reuse approach by the majority of practitioners in the studied companies. This is mainly due to its benefits such as simplicity, availability and independence of developers. Based on our observations, we outline issues preventing the adoption of systematic software reuse approaches, and identify future research directions.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

Dubinsky

Rubin

Berger

et al. 2013

2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

226

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Because we only apply clone detection, it is not the focus of the paper, and hence clone detection research is not discussed here. Instead we refer the interested reader to a recent comprehensive survey on clone detection research (Koschke 2007(Koschke , 2008aRoy and Cordy 2007).…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 98%

Extending the reflexion method for consolidating software variants into product lines

et al. 2009

Self Cite

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Software variants emerge from ad-hoc copying in-the-large with adaptations to a specific context. As the number of variants increases, maintaining such software variants becomes more and more difficult and expensive. In contrast to such ad-hoc reuse, software product lines offer organized ways of reuse, taking advantage of similarities of different products. To re-gain control, software variants may be consolidated as organized software product lines. In this paper, we describe a method and supporting tools to compare software variants at the architectural level extending the reflexion method to software variants. Murphy's reflexion method allows one to reconstruct the module view, a static architectural view describing the static components, their interfaces and dependencies and their grouping as layers and subsystems. The method consists of the specification of the module view and the mapping of implementation components onto the module view. An automatic analysis determines differences between the module view and its implementation. We extend the reflexion method from single systems to software variants. Because software variants share a very large amount of code, we can expect components of one variant to re-occur in the other variant either identically or at least similarly. We use similarity metrics to determine this type of correspondence among implementation components between two variants. Because the similarity metrics are expensive to compute, we use clone detection techniques to reduce the number of candidate pairs of implementation components for which the similarity is computed. The correspondence is then used to transfer as much as possible of the mapping for the analyzed variants to the next variant to be analyzed. Furthermore, we describe how to unify the individual product architectures into a software product line architecture.

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“…We can roughly distinguish three types of transformations: substitution, addition, and deletion. The following taxonomy summarizes the types of clones (Koschke, 2008a) (most research literature has distinguished only three types of clones; here, we present a more refined classification and map it to the one commonly used):…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An extended assessment of type-3 clones as detected by state-of-the-art tools

2010

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Code reuse through copying and pasting leads to so-called software clones. These clones can be roughly categorized into identical fragments (type-1 clones), fragments with parameter substitution (type-2 clones), and similar fragments that differ through modified, deleted, or added statements (type-3 clones). Although there has been extensive research on detecting clones, detection of type-3 clones is still an open research issue due to the inherent vagueness in their definition. In this paper, we analyze type-3 clones detected by state-of-the-art tools and investigate type-3 clones in terms of their syntactic differences. Then, we derive their underlying semantic abstractions from their syntactic differences. Finally, we investigate whether there are code characteristics that indicate that a tool-suggested clone candidate is a real type-3 clone from a human's perspective. Our findings can help developers of clone detectors and clone refactoring tools to improve their tools.

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Frontiers of software clone management

Cited by 39 publications

References 81 publications

An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

Extending the reflexion method for consolidating software variants into product lines

An extended assessment of type-3 clones as detected by state-of-the-art tools

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