Model clone detection in practice

Abstract

Cloned code is considered harmful for two reasons: (1) multiple, possibly unnecessary, duplicates of code increase maintenance costs and, (2) inconsistent changes to cloned code can create faults and, hence, lead to incorrect program behavior. Likewise, duplicated parts of models are problematic in model-based development. Recently, we and other authors proposed multiple approaches to automatically identify duplicates in graphical models. While it has been demonstrated that these approaches work in principal, a number of challenges remain for application in industrial practice. Based on an industrial case study undertaken with the BMW Group, this paper details on these challenges and presents solutions to the most pressing ones, namely scalability and relevance of the results. Moreover, we present tool support that eases the evaluation of detection results and thereby helps to make clone detection a standard technique in modelbased quality assurance.

A Survey of Model Comparison Approaches and Applications

“…They claim that this helps detect clones that CloneDetective can not. This is later refuted, however, by the authors of CloneDetective (Deissenboeck et al, 2010). aScan is able to detect approximate clones while CloneDetective is not.…”

“…By comparison with code clone detection, research in model clone detection is quite limited (Deissenboeck et al, 2010), with the majority of approaches thus far tailored for Simulink data-flow models.…”

Towards Statistical Comparison and Analysis of Models

“…Step for Model Recovery Model comparison (Stephan and Cordy, 2013) is found in the literature as a common operation in a wide range of application areas, such as model versioning (Altmanninger et al, 2009), model clone detection (Deissenboeck et al, 2010), model merging (Brunet et al, 2006), model matching (Kolovos et al, 2009) and model recovery (Klint et al, 2013). It is typically defined as a binary operator (sometimes ternary in model versioning), mapping two model elements to a similarity measure.…”

SimNav: Simulink navigation of model clone classes

“…Model Quality Assessor [5] is another tool used to view clone detection results (referred to by the authors as clone inspection). Model Quality Assessor is an external tool capable of visually displaying the clones that were detected, but lacks the direct integration with the Simulink environment provided by SimNav.…”