Abstract

Code cloning has been very often indicated as a bad software development practice. However, many studies appearing in the literature indicate that this is not always the case. In fact, either changes occurring in cloned code are consistently propagated, or cloning is used as a sort of templating strategy, where cloned source code fragments evolve independently. This paper (i) proposes an automatic approach to classify the evolution of source code clone fragments, and (ii) reports a fine-grained analysis of clone evolution in four different Java and C software systems, aimed at investigating to what extent clones are consistently propagated or they evolve independently. Also, the paper investigates the relationship between the presence of clone evolution patterns and other characteristics such as clone raSuresh Thummalapenta North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA E-mail: sthumma@ncsu.edu Luigi Cerulo, Lerina Aversano, Massimiliano Di Penta Department of Engineering -University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy E-mail: lcerulo@unisannio.it, aversano@unisannio.it, dipenta@unisannio.it 2 dius, clone size and the kind of change the clones underwent, i.e., corrective maintenance or enhancement.

Design patterns are solutions to recurring design problems, conceived to increase benefits in terms of reuse, code quality and, above all, maintainability and resilence to changes. This paper presents results from an empirical study aimed at understanding the evolution of design patterns in three open source systems, namely JHotDraw, ArgoUML, and Eclipse-JDT. Specifically, the study analyzes how frequently patterns are modified, to what changes they undergo and what classes co-change with the patterns. Results show how patterns more suited to support the application purpose tend to change more frequently, and that different kind of changes have a different impact on co-changed classes and a different capability of making the system resilent to changes.

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A version control system, such as CVS/SVN, can provide the history of software changes performed during the evolution of a software project. Among all the changes performed there are some which cause the introduction of bugs, often resolved later with other changes.In this paper we use a technique to identify bug-introducing changes to train a model that can be used to predict if a new change may introduces or not a bug. We represent software changes as elements of a n-dimensional vector space of terms coordinates extracted from source code snapshots.The evaluation of various learning algorithms on a set of open source projects looks very promising, in particular for KNN (K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm) where a significant tradeoff between precision and recall has been obtained.

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We present the GENESIS platform (GEneralised eNvironment for procEsS management in cooperatIve Software engineering), the outcome of a research project aiming at designing and developing a noninvasive and open‐source system to support software engineering processes in a highly distributed environment. The system supports the cooperation and coordination in software processes as its process modeling language enables the decomposition of complex processes into subprocesses that can be distributed and executed at different organizational sites. In GENESIS, workflow management technologies have been integrated with artifact management and communication services to meet the necessary requirements of managing the cooperation among distributed teams. Its strengths are a powerful activity management, covering all the main aspects of the life cycle of an activity; an efficient and flexible project monitoring, collecting productivity and quality metrics to show on‐demand snapshots of the whole process and of its parts at different levels of detail, and a careful consideration of the process evolution questions, allowing to adequately manage the most common exceptions happening during process execution in a simple and flexible way. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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