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research-article

Detecting differences across multiple instances of code clones

Authors:

Zhenchang Xing,

Wenyun ZhaoAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 164 - 174

https://doi.org/10.1145/2568225.2568298

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

König CRosiak KLinsbauer LSchaefer IFelfernig AFuentes L(2022)Synchronizing software variantsProceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3503229.3547053(82-89)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503229.3547053
Wang YWu RWang CWen MLiu YCheung SYu HXu CZhu Z(2022)Will Dependency Conflicts Affect My Program's Semantics?IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.305776748:7(2295-2316)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3057767
Sato FIkegami AIshio TShimari KMatsumoto K(2022)Comparing Execution Traces of Jupyter Notebook for Checking Correctness of Refactoring2022 IEEE 16th International Workshop on Software Clones (IWSC)10.1109/IWSC55060.2022.00019(62-68)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWSC55060.2022.00019
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Index Terms

Detecting differences across multiple instances of code clones
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2014

1139 pages

ISBN:9781450327565

DOI:10.1145/2568225

General Chair:
Pankaj Jalote
IIIT-Delhi, India
,
Program Chairs:
Lionel Briand
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
,
André van der Hoek
University of California, Irvine, USA

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 31 May 2014

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ICSE '14: 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 31 - June 7, 2014

Hyderabad, India

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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Cited By

König CRosiak KLinsbauer LSchaefer IFelfernig AFuentes L(2022)Synchronizing software variantsProceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3503229.3547053(82-89)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503229.3547053
Wang YWu RWang CWen MLiu YCheung SYu HXu CZhu Z(2022)Will Dependency Conflicts Affect My Program's Semantics?IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.305776748:7(2295-2316)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3057767
Sato FIkegami AIshio TShimari KMatsumoto K(2022)Comparing Execution Traces of Jupyter Notebook for Checking Correctness of Refactoring2022 IEEE 16th International Workshop on Software Clones (IWSC)10.1109/IWSC55060.2022.00019(62-68)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWSC55060.2022.00019
Wang JCho SSong M(2022)RepChaBug: Automatically Repairing Incorrect Change Bugs in Software Evolution2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00242(1525-1530)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00242
Wang HLin YYang ZSun JLiu YDong JZheng QLiu T(2021)Explaining Regressions via Alignment Slicing and MendingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.294956847:11(2421-2437)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
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Sobrinho EDe Lucia AMaia M(2021)A Systematic Literature Review on Bad Smells–5 W's: Which, When, What, Who, WhereIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.288097747:1(17-66)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
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Khapre SSingh PShankar ANayak SDiwakar M(2021)Context-based intelligent recommendation by code reuse for smart decision support and cognitive adaptive systemsInternational Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems10.1108/IJIUS-07-2021-005511:1(75-87)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2021
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Yu YHuang ZZhou YLi WShao Y(2020)ASPDup: AST-Sequence-based Progressive Duplicate Code Detection Tool for Onsite Programming CodeProceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3457913.3457938(260-264)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3457913.3457938
Zou YBan BXue YXu YGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)CCGraphProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416541(931-942)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
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Batista MParreira PCosta H(2019)An Exploratory Study on Detection of Cloned Code in Information SystemsProceedings of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems10.1145/3330204.3330277(1-8)Online publication date: 20-May-2019
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