Fifth international workshop on software clones

2009 13th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, 2009

Software clones are identical or similar pieces of code. They are often a result of copying and pasting as an act of ad-hoc reuse by programmers. Software clones research is of high relevance for industry. Many researchers have reported high rates of cloning in both industrial as well as open-source systems. Many techniques exist that try to detect clones. There are also lines of research in clone detection that evaluate these approaches, reason about ways to remove clones, assess the effect of clones on maintainablity, track their evolution, and investigate root causes of clones. Today, research in software clones is an established field with more than 100 publications in various conferences and journals.

International Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology, 2021

Copied code or code clones are a sort of code that contrarily affect the improvement and support of software frameworks. Software clone research in the past generally cantered around the discovery. what's more, examination of code clones, while research lately reaches out to the entire range of clone the board. In the last decade, three reviews showed up in the writing, which cover the recognition, examination and transformative attributes of code clones. This paper presents a complete overview on the state of the workmanship in clone the board, with top to bottom examination of clone the executives exercise (e.g., following, refactoring, cost benefit investigation) past the recognition and examination. This is the main overview on clone the board, where we highlight the accomplishments up until now, and uncover roads for additional exploration essential towards an incorporated clone the board framework. We accept that we have worked really hard in studying the territory of clon...

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12071 "Software Clone Management Towards Industrial Application". Software clones are identical or similar pieces of code or design. A lot of research has been devoted to software clones. Unlike previous research, this seminar put a particular emphasis on industrial application of software clone management methods and tools and aimed at gathering concrete usage scenarios of clone management in industry, which will help to identify new industrially relevant aspects in order to shape the future research. Talks were presented by industrial participants and working groups were formed to discuss issues in clone detection, presentation, and refactoring. In addition we developed a unified conceptual model to capture clone information required to support a common notion of clone data and for interoperability to foster exchange of data among researchers and tools in practice. The main focus of current research i...

2006

Abstract Code duplication is a well-documented problem in industrial software systems. There has been considerable research into techniques for detecting duplication in software, and there are several effective tools to perform this task. However, there have been few detailed qualitative studies into how cloning actually manifests itself within software systems.

2003

Abstract Code cloning—that is, the gratuitous duplication of source code within a software system—is an endemic problem in large, industrial systems [9, 7]. While there has been much research into techniques for clone detection and analysis, there has been relatively little empirical study on characterizing how, where, and why clones occur in industrial software systems.

2007

Clones are code segments that have been created by copying-and-pasting from other code segments. Clones occur often in large software systems. It is reported that 5 to 50% of the source code of a large software system is cloned. A major challenge when studying code cloning in large software systems is handling the large amount of clone candidates produced by leading edge clone detection tools. For example, the CCFinder, clone detection tool, produces over 7 million pairs of clone candidates for the Linux kernel (which consists of over 4 MLOC). Moreover, the output of clone detection tools grows rapidly as a software system evolves. Researchers and developers need tools to help them study the large amount of clone data in order to better understand the clone phenomena in large systems. In this paper, we propose a data mining framework to help researchers cope with the large amount of data produced by clone detection tools. We propose techniques to reduce, abstract and highlight the most interesting data produced by clone detection tools. Our framework also introduces a visualization tool which allows users to query and explore clone data at various abstraction levels. We demonstrate our framework on a case study of the clone phenomena in the Linux kernel.

Information and Software Technology, 2013

Context: Reusing software by means of copy and paste is a frequent activity in software development. The duplicated code is known as a software clone and the activity is known as code cloning. Software clones may lead to bug propagation and serious maintenance problems. Objective: This study reports an extensive systematic literature review of software clones in general and software clone detection in particular. Method: We used the standard systematic literature review method based on a comprehensive set of 213 articles from a total of 2039 articles published in 11 leading journals and 37 premier conferences and workshops. Results: Existing literature about software clones is classified broadly into different categories. The importance of semantic clone detection and model based clone detection led to different classifications. Empirical evaluation of clone detection tools/techniques is presented. Clone management, its benefits and cross cutting nature is reported. Number of studies pertaining to nine different types of clones is reported. Thirteen intermediate representations and 24 match detection techniques are reported. Conclusion: We call for an increased awareness of the potential benefits of software clone management, and identify the need to develop semantic and model clone detection techniques. Recommendations are given for future research.

IEEE Access, 2019

Cloning in software represents similar program structures having its own benefits and drawbacks. Proper clone analysis is required to exploit the benefits of clones. A study of software clone evolution serves the purpose of understanding the maintenance implications of clones, which leads to their appropriate management. Structural clones (recurring patterns of simple clones) represent design level similarities in software. Evolutionary characteristics of clones can assess the relevance of those clones for software developers and maintainers. Although the evolution of simple clones has been thoroughly studied by researchers, the evolution of structural clones is still to be explored. In this paper, we study the evolution of structural clones by performing a longitudinal study on multiple versions of five Java systems. To perform a systematic study of the structural clone evolution, we define structural clones and their evolution patterns in a formal notation. Our results show that structural clones are more likely to change inconsistently, however, less frequently than simple clones, whereas the lifetime of the structural clones is similar to that of the simple clones. Evolutionary characteristics of structural clones suggest that they require more attention in their management. Analysis of structural clone evolution reveals similar reasons for changes, and similar trends in evolution patterns, for all subject systems. These trends reveal evolutionary characteristics of structural clones that can help in devising appropriate strategies for managing them, hence devising better clone management systems. INDEX TERMS Clone evolution, software clones, structural clones, software engineering, software evolution, software design. JAWERIA KANWAL received the M.Phil. degree in computer science from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2011, where she is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in computer science. She was a Research Fellow with the Gradu-

2016

Code clones are parts of source code that were usually created by copy-paste activities, with some minor changes in terms of added and deleted lines, changes in variable names, types used etc. or no changes at all. Clones in code decrease overall quality of software product, since they directly decrease maintainability, increase fault-proneness and make changes harder. Numerous researches deal with clone analysis, propose categorizations and solutions, and many tools have been developed for source code clone detection. However, there are still open questions primarily regarding what are precise characteristics of code fragments that should be considered as clones. Furthermore, tools are primarily focused on clone detection for a specific language, or set of languages. In this paper, we propose a language-independent code clone analysis, introduced as part of SSQSA (Set of Software Quality Static Analyzers) platform, aimed to enable consistent static analysis of heterogeneous softwar...

2020

Code clones are novel subtle way to deal with issues pertaining from one territory module to another fragment or module. They are increasing the rate of peril in bug duplication within each code that has a copy, whenever there was a bug in wellspring of clone. The clone in code is equivalent to or indistinct code in the original source code that is made either by reproduction or a couple of changes. Clone is an indefatigable sort of programming reuses that effect on help of enormous programming. Till now, the researchers have underlined on perceiving type 1, type 2, and type 3 sort of clones. The present code clone area devices are utilized to perceive source code cloning present within them. Throughout this paper, a review is done on programming clone area to assess cross breed strategy subject to various parameters. Rather than using single technique on the code, creamer methodology is being used, suggests two strategies are being solidified together. We can achieve increasingly e...