Evaluating Code Clone Genealogies at Release Level: An Empirical Study

Saha, Ripon K.; Asaduzzaman, Muhammad; Zibran, Minhaz F.; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.

doi:10.1109/scam.2010.32

Cited by 42 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…In another study, Cai and Kim [6] investigated the characteristics of long lived clones and predicted the survival time of clones. In our previous study [23], we extended the study of Kim et al [14] by studying 17 open source systems of diverse variety and found no surprising results. However, in all these studies, CCFinder was used as the clone detection tool which mainly considers Type-1 and Type-2 clones.…”

Section: External Validitymentioning

confidence: 70%

“…If a clone class disappears very quickly, it would not be cost effective to manage/refactor it. In previous studies [6], [23], researchers found many Type-1/Type-2 clones that are long lived, and thus need to be managed. In this study, we want to see if the same results hold for Type-3 clones as well.…”

Section: Rq1: What Is the Lifetime Of Type-3 Clone Classes Compared Tmentioning

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: 70%

Section: Rq1: What Is the Lifetime Of Type-3 Clone Classes Compared Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…Another study on clone genealogies from Saha et al [21] on 17 open source systems written in C, Java, C++, and C# showed that the majority of the clone groups of clone genealogies either propagate without any syntactic changes or change consistently in the subsequent releases. Moreover, they found that only 11% to 38% of the clone genealogies changed consistently.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

Krinke

2011

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Clones

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It is still a debated question whether cloned code causes increased maintenance efforts. If cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code, i.e. it is changed less often, it will require less maintenance efforts. The more stable cloned code is, the longer it will not have been changed, so the stability can be estimated through the code's age. This paper presents a study on the average age of cloned code.For three large open source systems, the age of every line of source code is computed as the date of the last change in that line. In addition, every line is categorized whether it belongs to cloned code as detected by a clone detector. The study shows that on average, cloned code is older than non-cloned code. Moreover, if a file has cloned code, the average age of the cloned code of the file is lower than the average age of the non-cloned code in the same file. The results support the previous findings that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code.

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“…Saha et al [8] conduct the function mapping between versions according to the name and file path, then to map clone from the detection results. Although this approach can improve the running time, it is easy to be affected by the change in the position of the clone.…”

Section: Clone Trackingmentioning

confidence: 99%