Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
7-2014
Abstract
Clone detectors find similar code fragments (i.e., instances of code clones) and report large numbers of them for industrial systems. To maintain or manage code clones, developers often have to investigate differences of multiple cloned code fragments. However,existing program differencing techniques compare only two code fragments at a time. Developers then have to manually combine several pairwise differencing results. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically detecting differences across multiple clone instances. We have implemented our approach as an Eclipse plugin and evaluated its accuracy with three Java software systems. Our evaluation shows that our algorithm has precision over 97.66% and recall over 95.63% in three open source Java projects. We also conducted a user study of 18 developers to evaluate the usefulness of our approach for eight clone-related refactoring tasks. Our study shows that our approach can significantly improve developers’performance in refactoring decisions, refactoring details, and task completion time on clone-related refactoring tasks. Automatically detecting differences across multiple clone instances also opens opportunities for building practical applications of code clones in software maintenance, such as auto-generation of application skeleton, intelligent simultaneous code editing.
Keywords
Code clone, Program differencing, Human study
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '14, Hyderabad India, 2014 May 31 - June 7
First Page
164
Last Page
174
ISBN
9781450327565
Identifier
10.1145/2568225.2568298
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
India
Citation
LIN, Yun; XING, Zhenchang; XUE, Yinxing; LIU, Yang; PENG, Xin; SUN, Jun; and ZHAO, Wenyun.
Detecting differences across multiple instances of code clones. (2014). Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '14, Hyderabad India, 2014 May 31 - June 7. 164-174.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4989
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/2568225.2568298