Clonepedia: Summarizing code clones by common syntactic context for software maintenance

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SimNav: Simulink navigation of model clone classes

SimNav is a GUI designed for displaying and navigating clone classes of Simulink models detected by the model clone detector Simone. As an embedded Simulink interface tool, SimNav allows model developers to explore detected clones directly in their own model development environment rather than a separate research tool interface. SimNav allows users to open selected models for side-by-side comparison, in order to visually explore clone classes and view the differences in the clone instances, as well as to explore the context in which the clones exist. This tool paper describes the motivation, implementation, and use cases for SimNav

A systematic literature review on source code similarity measurement and clone detection: techniques, applications, and challenges

Measuring and evaluating source code similarity is a fundamental software engineering activity that embraces a broad range of applications, including but not limited to code recommendation, duplicate code, plagiarism, malware, and smell detection. This paper proposes a systematic literature review and meta-analysis on code similarity measurement and evaluation techniques to shed light on the existing approaches and their characteristics in different applications. We initially found over 10000 articles by querying four digital libraries and ended up with 136 primary studies in the field. The studies were classified according to their methodology, programming languages, datasets, tools, and applications. A deep investigation reveals 80 software tools, working with eight different techniques on five application domains. Nearly 49% of the tools work on Java programs and 37% support C and C++, while there is no support for many programming languages. A noteworthy point was the existence of 12 datasets related to source code similarity measurement and duplicate codes, of which only eight datasets were publicly accessible. The lack of reliable datasets, empirical evaluations, hybrid methods, and focuses on multi-paradigm languages are the main challenges in the field. Emerging applications of code similarity measurement concentrate on the development phase in addition to the maintenance.Comment: 49 pages, 10 figures, 6 table

Dealing with clones in software : a practical approach from detection towards management

Despite the fact that duplicated fragments of code also called code clones are considered one of the prominent code smells that may exist in software, cloning is widely practiced in industrial development. The larger the system, the more people involved in its development and the more parts developed by different teams result in an increased possibility of having cloned code in the system. While there are particular benefits of code cloning in software development, research shows that it might be a source of various troubles in evolving software. Therefore, investigating and understanding clones in a software system is important to manage the clones efficiently. However, when the system is fairly large, it is challenging to identify and manage those clones properly. Among the various types of clones that may exist in software, research shows detection of near-miss clones where there might be minor to significant differences (e.g., renaming of identifiers and additions/deletions/modifications of statements) among the cloned fragments is costly in terms of time and memory. Thus, there is a great demand of state-of-the-art technologies in dealing with clones in software. Over the years, several tools have been developed to detect and visualize exact and similar clones. However, usually the tools are standalone and do not integrate well with a software developer's workflow. In this thesis, first, a study is presented on the effectiveness of a fingerprint based data similarity measurement technique named 'simhash' in detecting clones in large scale code-base. Based on the positive outcome of the study, a time efficient detection approach is proposed to find exact and near-miss clones in software, especially in large scale software systems. The novel detection approach has been made available as a highly configurable and fully fledged standalone clone detection tool named 'SimCad', which can be configured for detection of clones in both source code and non-source code based data. Second, we show a robust use of the clone detection approach studied earlier by assembling its detection service as a portable library named 'SimLib'. This library can provide tightly coupled (integrated) clone detection functionality to other applications as opposed to loosely coupled service provided by a typical standalone tool. Because of being highly configurable and easily extensible, this library allows the user to customize its clone detection process for detecting clones in data having diverse characteristics. We performed a user study to get some feedback on installation and use of the 'SimLib' API (Application Programming Interface) and to uncover its potential use as a third-party clone detection library. Third, we investigated on what tools and techniques are currently in use to detect and manage clones and understand their evolution. The goal was to find how those tools and techniques can be made available to a developer's own software development platform for convenient identification, tracking and management of clones in the software. Based on that, we developed a clone-aware software development platform named 'SimEclipse' to promote the practical use of code clone research and to provide better support for clone management in software. Finally, we evaluated 'SimEclipse' by conducting a user study on its effectiveness, usability and information management. We believe that both researchers and developers would enjoy and utilize the benefit of using these tools in different aspect of code clone research and manage cloned code in software systems

Introduction of static quality analysis in small- and medium-sized software enterprises: experiences from technology transfer

Today, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the software industry face major challenges. Their resource constraints require high efficiency in development. Furthermore, quality assurance (QA) measures need to be taken to mitigate the risk of additional, expensive effort for bug fixes or compensations. Automated static analysis (ASA) can reduce this risk because it promises low application effort. SMEs seem to take little advantage of this opportunity. Instead, they still mainly rely on the dynamic analysis approach of software testing. In this article, we report on our experiences from a technology transfer project. Our aim was to evaluate the results static analysis can provide for SMEs as well as the problems that occur when introducing and using static analysis in SMEs. We analysed five software projects from five collaborating SMEs using three different ASA techniques: code clone detection, bug pattern detection and architecture conformance analysis. Following the analysis, we applied a quality model to aggregate and evaluate the results. Our study shows that the effort required to introduce ASA techniques in SMEs is small (mostly below one person-hour each). Furthermore, we encountered only few technical problems. By means of the analyses, we could detect multiple defects in production code. The participating companies perceived the analysis results to be a helpful addition to their current QA and will include the analyses in their QA process. With the help of the Quamoco quality model, we could efficiently aggregate and rate static analysis results. However, we also encountered a partial mismatch with the opinions of the SMEs. We conclude that ASA and quality models can be a valuable and affordable addition to the QA process of SMEs