Applying clone change notification system into an industrial development process

Abstract

Abstract-Programmers tend to write code clones unintentionally even in the case that they can easily avoid them. Clone change management is one of crucial issues in open source software (OSS) development as well as in industrial software development (e.g., development of social infrastructure, financial system, and medical equipment). When an industrial developer fixes a defect, he/she has to find the code clones corresponding to the code fragment including it. So far, several studies performed on the analysis of clone evolution in OSS. However, to our knowledge, a few researches have been reported on an application of a clone change notification system to industrial development process. In this paper, we introduce a system for notifying creation and change of code clones, and then report on the experience with 40-days application of it into a development process in NEC Corporation. In the industrial application, a developer successfully identified ten unintentionally-developed clones that should be refactored.

A comparative study of test code clones and production code clones

“…One school of thought in the cloning community argues that non-harmful clones should be tolerated and that tool support should focus on managing the consistency between clones [53]. Several such consistent change recommenders have been created over the years, we list just a few: CloneTracker [54], CodeCloningEvents [55], Clone Change Notification [56], Clone Notifier [57]. Knowing that clones in test code often get copied multiple times, it would be interesting to explore how such recommender systems would work for test code.…”

The vision of software clone management: Past, present, and future (Keynote paper)

“…Indeed, a client-server implementation cannot support those individual programmers who work alone on their stand-alone local machines [143]. But, the centralized architecture may facilitate the integration of clone detection features with the continuous or periodic (e.g., diurnal) build process [135].…”

“…There are several clone detectors available as Eclipse plug-ins and only recently Microsoft introduced a clone management feature in Microsoft Visual Studio [26,130]. There are several other industrial attempts as well [128,135] including a recent Dagstuhl seminar on the topic [13].…”

An Investigation into the Characteristics of Merged Code Clones during Software Evolution

“…For example, when a developer detects a code fragment with a defect, the developer has to inspect all of the fragment's code clones for the same defect. However, developers tend to write code clones unintentionally, even in situations where they can be easily avoided [2].…”

“…Lately, the clone research community has gradually shifted its focus from detection to management [2], [6]. Clone refactoring is one of the most vital features of code clones management.…”