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Experiment on the automatic detection of function clones in a software system using metrics
Abstract
This paper presents a technique to automatically identify duplicate and near duplicate functions in a large software system. The identification technique is based on metrics extracted from the source code using the tool Datrix/sup TM/. This clone identification technique uses 21 function metrics grouped into four points of comparison. Each point of comparison is used to compare functions and determine their cloning level. An ordinal scale of eight cloning levels is defined. The levels range from an exact copy to distinct functions. The metrics, the thresholds and the process used are fully described. The results of applying the clone detection technique to two telecommunication monitoring systems totaling one million lines of source code are provided as examples. The information provided by this study is useful in monitoring the maintainability of large software systems.
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Cited by
DECKARD: Scalable and Accurate Tree-Based Detection of Code Clones
Jiang, L., Misherghi, G., Su, Z., & Glondu, S. (2007) · 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07) · doi:10.1109/icse.2007.30 · Cited by 1,039
Roy, C. K., & Cordy, J. R. (2008) · 2008 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension · doi:10.1109/icpc.2008.41 · Cited by 533
Finding Clones with Dup: Analysis of an Experiment
Baker, B. S. (2007) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2007.70720 · Cited by 85
Metadata
- Authors
- Mayrand, Leblanc, & Merlo
- Venue
- Proceedings of International Conference on Software Maintenance ICSM-96
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 1996
- Pages
- 244-253
- OpenAlex
- W1698439592
- Cited by
- 528
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 4.46
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Experiment on the automatic detection of function clones in a software system using metrics. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/icsm.1996.565012
- The paper
- Mayrand, Leblanc, & Merlo. (1996). Experiment on the automatic detection of function clones in a software system using metrics. Proceedings of International Conference on Software Maintenance ICSM-96. https://doi.org/10.1109/icsm.1996.565012
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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