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An empirical study of code clone genealogies
Abstract
It has been broadly assumed that code clones are inherently bad and that eliminating clones by refactoring would solve the problems of code clones. To investigate the validity of this assumption, we developed a formal definition of clone evolution and built a clone genealogy tool that automatically extracts the history of code clones from a source code repository. Using our tool we extracted clone genealogy information for two Java open source projects and analyzed their evolution. Our study contradicts some conventional wisdom about clones. In particular, refactoring may not always improve software with respect to clones for two reasons. First, many code clones exist in the system for only a short time; extensive refactoring of such short-lived clones may not be worthwhile if they are likely diverge from one another very soon. Second, many clones, especially long-lived clones that have changed consistently with other elements in the same group, are not easily refactorable due to programming language limitations. These insights show that refactoring will not help in dealing with some types of clones and open up opportunities for complementary clone maintenance tools that target these other classes of clones.
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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
Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits
LaToza, T. D., Venolia, G., & DeLine, R. (2006) · Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering · doi:10.1145/1134285.1134355 · Cited by 628
Roy, C. K., & Cordy, J. R. (2008) · 2008 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension · doi:10.1109/icpc.2008.41 · Cited by 533
Quantifying the Effect of Code Smells on Maintenance Effort
Sjoberg, D. I. K., Yamashita, A., Anda, B. C. D., Mockus, A., & Dyba, T. (2013) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2012.89 · Cited by 316
Retrieval-based neural source code summarization
Zhang, J., Wang, X., Zhang, H., Sun, H., & Liu, X. (2020) · Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3377811.3380383 · Cited by 275
Metadata
- Authors
- Kim, M., Sazawal, V., Notkin, D., & Murphy, G.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2005-09
- Pages
- 187-196
- OpenAlex
- W2074529754
- Cited by
- 523
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 19.22
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Kim, M., Sazawal, V., Notkin, D., & Murphy, G. (2005). An empirical study of code clone genealogies. Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering. https://doi.org/10.1145/1081706.1081737
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