Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

9-2016

Abstract

More and more mobile applications run on multiple mobile operating systems to attract more users of different platforms. Although versions on different platforms are implemented in different programming languages (e.g., Java and Objective-C), there must be many code snippets that implement the similar business logic on different platforms. Such code snippets are called cross-platform clones. It is challenging but essential to detect such clones for software maintenance. Due to the practice that developers usually use some common identifiers when implementing the same business logic on different platforms, in this paper, we investigate the identifier similarity of the same mobile application on different platforms and provide insights about the feasibility of cross-platform clone detection via identifier similarity. In our experiment, we have analyzed the source code of 18 open-source cross-platform applications which are implemented on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, and find that the smaller KL-Divergence the application has, the more accurate the clones detected by identifiers will be.

Keywords

Cross-platform application, Identifier similarity, Code clone

Discipline

Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

SoftwareMining 2016: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Mining, Singapore, 3 September

First Page

39

Last Page

42

ISBN

9781450345118

Identifier

10.1145/2975961.2975967

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

http://doi.org./10.1145/2975961.2975967

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