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Code clones are similar code fragments that occur at multiple locations in a software system. Detection of code clones provides useful information for maintenance, reengineering, program understanding and reuse. Several techniques have been proposed to detect code clones. These techniques differ in the code representation used for analysis of clones, ranging from plain text to parse trees and program dependence graphs. Clone detection based on lexical tokens involves minimal code transformation and gives good results, but is computationally expensive because of the large number of tokens that need to be compared. We explored string algorithms to find suitable data structures and algorithms for efficient token based clone detection and implemented them in our tool Repeated Tokens Finder (RTF). Instead of using suffix tree for string matching, we use more memory efficient suffix array. RTF incorporates a suffix array based linear time algorithm to detect string matches. It also provides a simple and customizable tokenization mechanism. Initial analysis and experiments show that our clone detection is simple, scalable, and performs better than the previous wellknown tools.

Cloning in software systems is known to create problems during software maintenance. Several techniques have been proposed to detect the same or similar code fragments in software, so-called simple clones. While the knowledge of simple clones is useful, detecting design-level similarities in software could ease maintenance even further, and also help us identify reuse opportunities. We observed that recurring patterns of simple clones -so-called structural clones -often indicate the presence of interesting design-level similarities. An example would be patterns of collaborating classes or components. Finding structural clones that signify potentially useful design information requires efficient techniques to analyze the bulk of simple clone data and making non-trivial inferences based on the abstracted information.In this paper, we describe a practical solution to the problem of detecting some basic, but useful, types of design-level similarities such as groups of highly similar classes or files. First, we detect simple clones by applying conventional token-based techniques. Then we find the patterns of co-occurring clones in different files using the Frequent Itemset Mining (FIM) technique. Finally, we perform file clustering to detect those clusters of highly similar files that are likely to contribute to a design-level similarity pattern. The novelty of our approach is application of data mining techniques to detect design level similarities. Experiments confirmed that our method finds many useful structural clones and scales up to big programs. The paper describes our method for structural clone detection, a prototype tool called Clone Miner that implements the method and experimental results.

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Teaching refactoring effectively while making students realize the importance and benefits of refactoring is a challenge. In this direction, an experiment was carried out while conducting the course project for the Refactoring and Design Patterns course. This paper discusses the results of the experiment that involved two different project schemes to carry out refactoring activities on the same code base.One scheme was post-enhancement refactoring and the other was pre-enhancement refactoring. The aim of the experiment was to decide which scheme was beneficial in terms of better understanding, appreciation, and implementation of refactoring.

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