Tracking Code Clones in Evolving Software

Duala-Ekoko, Ekwa; Robillard, Martin P.

doi:10.1109/icse.2007.90

Cited by 145 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A copy of a section of code within a file is software cloning. Recent publications [64][65][66][67][68] and reviews [69][70][71] show that this is an active research theme. Our concern is not clone detection as such: the search for clones involves search through multiple sources.…”

Section: Similarity Not Differencementioning

confidence: 99%

Studying software evolution using artefacts’ shared information content

Arbuckle¹

2011

Science of Computer Programming

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

a b s t r a c tIn order to study software evolution, it is necessary to measure artefacts representative of project releases. If we consider the process of software evolution to be copying with subsequent modification, then, by analogy, placing emphasis on what remains the same between releases will lead to focusing on similarity between artefacts. At the same time, software artefacts -stored digitally as binary strings -are all information. This paper introduces a new method for measuring software evolution in terms of artefacts' shared information content. A similarity value representing the quantity of information shared between artefact pairs is produced using a calculation based on Kolmogorov complexity. Similarity values for releases are then collated over the software's evolution to form a map quantifying change through lack of similarity. The method has general applicability: it can disregard otherwise salient software features such as programming paradigm, language or application domain because it considers software artefacts purely in terms of the mathematically justified concept of information content. Three open-source projects are analysed to show the method's utility. Preliminary experiments on udev and git verify the measurement of the projects' evolutions. An experiment on ArgoUML validates the measured evolution against experimental data from other studies.

show abstract

Section: Similarity Not Differencementioning

confidence: 99%

Studying software evolution using artefacts’ shared information content

Arbuckle¹

2011

Science of Computer Programming

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Duala-Ekoko at al. also has proposed a simultaneous editing method [12]. The method identifies corresponding lines in code fragments being similar to each other based on the Levenshtein distance 6 after the code fragments are detected.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

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

“…In this study, we compare the effort (as measured in terms of number of lines changed) to fix a bug based on its clone content. Ekoko and Robillard (2007) propose a tool for tracking clones in evolving software. Their tool supports simultaneous editing of clones, along with notification to developer when one of the clones changes.…”

Section: Tool Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clones: what is that smell?

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Clones are generally considered bad programming practice in software engineering folklore. They are identified as a bad smell (Fowler et al. 1999) and a major contributor to project maintenance difficulties. Clones inherently cause code bloat, thus increasing project size and maintenance costs. In this work, we try to validate the conventional wisdom empirically to see whether cloning makes code more defect prone. This paper analyses the relationship between cloning and defect proneness. For the four medium to large open source projects that we studied, we find that, first, the great majority of bugs are not significantly associated with clones. Second, we find that clones may be less defect prone than non-cloned code. Third, we find little evidence that clones with more copies are actually more error prone. Fourth, we find little evidence to support the claim that clone groups that span more than one file or directory are more defect prone than collocated clones. Finally, we find that developers do not need to put a disproportionately higher effort to fix clone dense bugs. Our findings do not support the claim that clones are really a "bad smell" (Fowler et al. 1999). Perhaps we can clone, and breathe easily, at the same time.

show abstract

Tracking Code Clones in Evolving Software

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 145 publications

References 17 publications

Studying software evolution using artefacts’ shared information content

Studying software evolution using artefacts’ shared information content

Simultaneous Modification Support based on Code Clone Analysis

Clones: what is that smell?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About