A Study of Consistent and Inconsistent Changes to Code Clones

Krinke, Jens

doi:10.1109/wcre.2007.7

Cited by 141 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Krinke [15] analyzed five open source software systems and found that half of the changes to code clone classes are inconsistent and that corrective changes following inconsistent changes are rare. In another study [16], he found that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code and thus concluded that cloned code requires less maintenance effort compared to non-cloned code.…”

Section: External Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These studies retrospectively investigated how clone classes are modified through versions for different levels of granularity, for different subject systems written in different languages, using different clone detection tools, and from different perspectives. However, most of the studies [2], [14], [15], [23], [25] focused on only Type-1 and Type-2 clones. Therefore, the existing knowledge regarding the evolution of Type-1 and Type-2 clones is reasonably rich.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding the evolution of Type-3 clones: An exploratory study

Saha

Roy

Schneider

et al. 2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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Abstract-Understanding the evolution of clones is important for both understanding the maintenance implications of clones and for building a robust clone management system. To this end, researchers have already conducted a number of studies to analyze the evolution of clones, mostly focusing on Type-1 and Type-2 clones. However, although there are a significant number of Type-3 clones in software systems, we know a little how they actually evolve. In this paper, we perform an exploratory study on the evolution of Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3 clones in six open source software systems written in two different programming languages and compare the result with a previous study to better understand the evolution of Type-3 clones. Our results show that although Type-3 clones are more likely to change inconsistently, the absolute number of consistently changed Type-3 clone classes is greater than that of Type-1 and Type-2. Type-3 clone classes also have a lifespan similar to that of Type-1 and Type-2 clones. In addition, a considerable number of Type-1 and Type-2 clones convert into Type-3 clones during evolution. Therefore, it is important to manage type-3 clones properly to limit their negative impact. However, various automated clone management techniques such as notifying developers about clone changes or linked editing should be chosen carefully due to the inconsistent nature of Type-3 clones.

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Section: External Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the evolution of Type-3 clones: An exploratory study

Saha

Roy

Schneider

et al. 2013

2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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“…Krinke [32] also presented a study on changes to code clones with an aim to understand if these change are consistent to all code clones of a clone group. His results are consistent with ours and show how, during the evolution of a system, code clones of a clone group are consistently changed; moreover, when the changes are inconsistent the missing changes will appear in a later version.…”

Section: Clone Genealogy and Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

et al. 2009

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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.

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“…They examined different clone types (e.g., accidental clones) by analyzing clones across systems in the same domain, whereas we have studied a wide variety of systems and concentrated on copy/paste function clones of individual system. Krinke [18] has conducted an empirical study with five C/C++/Java systems, focussing on consistent and inconsistent changes to exact code clones in different versions of the subject systems. The most closely related work to ours is the work of Rajapakse and Jarzabek [20] which was also one of the motivations of our study.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of Function Clones in Open Source Software

Roy

Cordy

2008

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

100

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The new hybrid clone detection tool NICAD combines the strengths and overcomes the limitations of both textbased and AST-based clone detection techniques to yield highly accurate identification of cloned code in software systems. In this paper, we present a first empirical study of function clones in open source software using NICAD. We examine more than 15 open source C and Java systems, including the entire Linux Kernel and Apache httpd, and analyze their use of cloned code in several different dimensions, including language, clone size, clone location and clone density by proportion of cloned functions. We manually verify all detected clones and provide a complete catalogue of different clones in an online repository in a variety of formats. These validated results can be used as a cloning reference for these systems and as a benchmark for evaluating other clone detection tools.

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A Study of Consistent and Inconsistent Changes to Code Clones

Cited by 141 publications

References 14 publications

Understanding the evolution of Type-3 clones: An exploratory study

Understanding the evolution of Type-3 clones: An exploratory study

An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

An Empirical Study of Function Clones in Open Source Software

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