Title
Frequency and risks of changes to clones
Abstract
Code Clones - duplicated source fragments - are said to increase maintenance effort and to facilitate problems caused by inconsistent changes to identical parts. While this is certainly true for some clones and certainly not true for others, it is unclear how many clones are real threats to the system's quality and need to be taken care of. Our analysis of clone evolution in mature software projects shows that most clones are rarely changed and the number of unintentional inconsistent changes to clones is small. We thus have to carefully select the clones to be managed to avoid unnecessary effort managing clones with no risk potential.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/1985793.1985836
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
clone evolution,real threat,mature software project,maintenance effort,code clones,unnecessary effort,risk potential,unintentional inconsistent change,identical part,inconsistent change,merging,software quality,maintenance engineering,terminology,cloning,java,software maintenance,data flow analysis
Systems engineering,Computer science,Merge (version control)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
50
1.77
29
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nils Göde121213.98
Rainer Koschke23019183.89