Tracking code clones in evolving software

Duala-Ekoko, Ekwa; Robillard, Martin P.

doi:10.1145/1342211.1342218

Cited by 26 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Although developers consistently change clones, the way they keep track of these clones is mainly based on their personal knowledge, on ad-hoc mechanisms, or on the use of common code browsing tools and integrated development environments. This suggests that, although developers are already able to successfully cope with clone change propagation, recommender systems able to support clone tracing, such as the one proposed by DualaEkoko and Robillard [16], or tools automatically tracing clones, e.g., based on the approach presented in this paper, can be beneficial.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In such a case the clone class, after the change propagation, shall not contain any inconsistent clone section pairs. 16 Let us consider a clone fragment pair, CFx and CFy, composed of three clone section pairs, CS 1 x,y (60% of the lines), CS 2 x,y (10% of the lines), and CS 3 x,y (30% of the lines) with the following sequences of clone section states in the interval of observation ranging from snapshot S 1 to snapshot S 5 :…”

Section: Identification Of Clone Fragment Pairs Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Duala-Ekoko and Robillard [16] proposed a technique for tracking clones in evolving software, where their technique notifies developers of modifications to clone regions and supports the simultaneous editing of clone regions. They assessed, by means of an experiment, the usefulness of the proposed approach.…”

Section: Clone Genealogy and Tracingmentioning

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: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Identification Of Clone Fragment Pairs Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

et al. 2009

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“…It is also shown that the method produces better analysis results compared to existing code clone trackers. In fact, the system could track not only all clone regions reported in the previous literature [5,6,3,7,8], but also regions that escaped from previous analysis [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…To distinguish newly introduced clone regions from those lasting from previous versions involves an awkward task of adjusting similarity thresholds by heuristics [3]. The method for tracking cloned code is relatively less explored with several exceptions [5,3,[6][7][8] despite its practical importance. In this paper, we propose an automated method for detecting and tracking homologues in genealogy of evolving software using a fine-grained tree differencing tool called Diff/TS [9] for source code.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Method for Analyzing Code Homology in Genealogy of Evolving Software

Hashimoto¹,

Mori

2010

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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Abstract. A software project often contains a large amount of "homologous code", i.e., similar code distributed in different versions or "species" sharing common ancestry. Homologous code fragments are prone to incur additional maintenance efforts since changes of their common characters must be replicated on each code fragment to keep the system consistent or up to date. We propose an automated method for detecting and tracking homologous code in genealogy of evolving software using finegrained tree differencing on source code. Locating homologous code and tracking its course of change would help software developers/maintainers to better understand the source code and to detect/prevent inconsistent modifications that may lead to latent errors. To show the capability of the method, the results of experiments on several large-scale software are reported including BIND9 DNS servers, a couple of Java software systems jEdit and Ant, and Linux device drivers.

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Clone refactoring inspection by summarizing clone refactorings and detecting inconsistent changes during software evolution

Chen

Kwon

Song

2018

J Software Evolu Process

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It has been broadly assumed that removing code clones by refactorings would solve the problems of code duplication. Despite recent empirical studies on the benefit of refactorings, contradicting evidence shows that it is often difficult or impossible to remove clones by using standard refactoring techniques. Developers cannot easily determine which clones can be refactored or how they should be maintained scattered throughout a large code base in evolving systems. We propose pattern‐based clone refactoring inspection (PRI), a technique for managing clone refactorings. PRI summarizes refactorings of clones and detects clones that are not consistently refactored. To help developers refactor these anomalies, PRI also visualizes clone evolution and refactorings and fixes refactoring anomalies to prevent the clone group from being left in an inconsistent state. We evaluated PRI on 6 open‐source projects and showed that it identifies clone refactorings with 94.1% accuracy and detects inconsistent refactorings with 98.4% accuracy, tracking clone change histories. In a study with 10 student developers, the participants reported that flexible PRI's summarization and detection features can be valuable for novice developers to learn about refactorings to clones. These results show that PRI should improve developer productivity in inspecting clone refactorings distributed across multiple files in evolving systems.

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Tracking code clones in evolving software

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 26 publications

References 16 publications

An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

A Method for Analyzing Code Homology in Genealogy of Evolving Software

Clone refactoring inspection by summarizing clone refactorings and detecting inconsistent changes during software evolution

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