Aiding Comprehension of Cloning Through Categorization

Abstract

Management of duplicated code in software systems is important in ensuring its graceful evolution. Commonly clone detection tools return large numbers of detected clones with little or no information about them, making clone management impractical and unscalable. We have used a taxonomy of clones to augment current clone detection tools in order to increase the user comprehension of duplication of code within software systems and filter false positives from the clone set. We support our arguments by means of 2 case studies, where we found that as much as 53% of clones can be grouped to form Function clones or Partial Function clones and we were able to filter out as many as 65% of clones as false positives from the reported clone pairs