Clone detection using abstract syntax trees

Baxter, Ira D.; Yahin, A.; Moura, Leonardo de; Sant’Anna, M. M.; Bier, L.

doi:10.1109/icsm.1998.738528

Cited by 828 publications

(650 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…It has been defined as one of the code cloning patterns by (Kapser 2006;Kapser and Godfrey 2008). Boiler-plate code can be found when building device drivers for operating systems (Baxter et al 1998), developing android applications , and giving programming assignments (Burrows et al 2007;Schleimer et al 2003). Boiler-plate code usually contains small code modifications in order to adapt the boiler-plate code to a new environment.…”

Section: Source Code Modificationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, tree-based similarity measures have a high computational complexity. The comparison of two ASTs with N nodes can have an upper bound of O(N 3 ) (Baxter et al 1998). Usually an optimising mechanism or approximation is included in the similarity computation to lower the computation time (Jiang et al 2007b).…”

Section: Code Similarity Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Usually an optimising mechanism or approximation is included in the similarity computation to lower the computation time (Jiang et al 2007b). A few examples of well-known tree-based tools include CloneDR (Baxter et al 1998), and Deckard (Jiang et al 2007b).…”

Section: Code Similarity Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A comparison of code similarity analysers

2017

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Copying and pasting of source code is a common activity in software engineering. Often, the code is not copied as it is and it may be modified for various purposes; e.g. refactoring, bug fixing, or even software plagiarism. These code modifications could affect the performance of code similarity analysers including code clone and plagiarism detectors to some certain degree. We are interested in two types of code modification in this study: pervasive modifications, i.e. transformations that may have a global effect, and local modifications, i.e. code changes that are contained in a single method or code block. We evaluate 30 code similarity detection techniques and tools using five experimental scenarios for Java source code. These are (1) pervasively modified code, created with tools for source code and bytecode obfuscation, and boiler-plate code, (2) source code normalisation through compilation and decompilation using different decompilers, (3) reuse of optimal configurations over different data sets, (4) tool evaluation using ranked-based measures, and (5) local + global code modifications. Our experimental results show that in the presence of pervasive modifications, some of the general textual similarity measures can offer similar performance to specialised code similarity tools, whilst in the presence of boiler-plate code, highly specialised source code similarity detection techniques and tools outperform textual similarity measures. Our study strongly validates the use of compilation/decompilation as a normalisation technique. Its use reduced false classifications to zero for three of the tools. Moreover, we demonstrate that optimal configurations are very sensitive to a specific data set. After directly applying optimal configurations derived from one data set to another, the tools perform poorly on the new data set. The code similarity analysers are thoroughly evaluated not only based on several well-known pair-based and query-based error measures but also on each specific type of pervasive code modification. This broad, thorough study is the largest in existence and potentially an invaluable guide for future users of similarity detection in source code.

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Section: Source Code Modificationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Code Similarity Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A comparison of code similarity analysers

2017

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“…AST is considered to be more accurate than token-based comparison [3]. Baxter et al [2] detect code clones using abstract syntax tree. In this research, we leverage CloneDR [8], an AST based clone detector to identify clones in the business logic tier.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Clones in Business Applications

Guo

Zou

2008

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

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“…This is because, implementing a similar feature also requires producing similar code fragments. Such similar code fragments are called code clones [1], [2]. It is generally desirable to remove or not to create a code clone; however, some types of code clones are difficult to resolve.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes of Evaluation Values on Component Rank Model by Taking Code Clones into Consideration

Yokomori

Yoshida

Noro

et al. 2018

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYThere are many software systems that have been used and maintained for a long time. By undergoing such a maintenance process, similar code fragments were intentionally left in the source code of such software, and knowing how to manage a software system that contains a lot of similar code fragments becomes a major concern. In this study, we proposed a method to pick up components that were commonly used in similar code fragments from a target software system. This method was realized by using the component rank model and by checking the differences of evaluation values for each component before and after merging components that had similar code fragments. In many cases, components whose evaluation value had decreased would be used by both the components that were merged, so we considered that these components were commonly used in similar code fragments. Based on the proposed approach, we implemented a system to calculate differences of evaluation values for each component, and conducted three evaluation experiments to confirm that our method was useful for detecting components that were commonly used in similar code fragments, and to confirm how our method can help developers when developers add similar components. Based on the experimental results, we also discuss some improvement methods and provide the results from applications of these methods.

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Clone detection using abstract syntax trees

Cited by 828 publications

References 7 publications

A comparison of code similarity analysers

A comparison of code similarity analysers

Detecting Clones in Business Applications

Changes of Evaluation Values on Component Rank Model by Taking Code Clones into Consideration

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