Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2007

Abstract

Detecting code clones has many software engineering applications. Existing approaches either do not scale to large code bases or are not robust against minor code modifications. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for identifying similar subtrees and apply it to tree representations of source code. Our algorithm is based on a novel characterization of subtrees with numerical vectors in the Euclidean Rn and an efficient algorithm to cluster these vectors w.r.t. the Euclidean distance metric. Subtrees with vectors in one cluster are considered similar. We have implemented our tree similarity algorithm as a clone detection tool called DECKARD and evaluated it on large code bases written in C and Java including the Linux kernel and JDK. Our experiments show that DECKARD is both scalable and accurate. It is also language independent, applicable to any language with a formally specified grammar.

Keywords

detection of code clones, software engineering applications, efficient algorithm

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ICSE 2007: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering: Minneapolis, 20-26 May 2007

First Page

96

Last Page

105

ISBN

9780769528281

Identifier

10.1109/ICSE.2007.30

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICSE.2007.30

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