Paper Info
Title
Code Similarities Beyond Copy & Paste
Abstract
Redundant source code hinders software maintenance, since updates have to be performed in multiple places. This holds independent of whether redundancy was created by copy&paste or by independent development of behaviorally similar code. Existing clone detection tools successfully discover syntactically similar redundant code. They thus work well for redundancy that has been created by copy&paste. But: how syntactically similar is behaviorally similar code of independent origin? This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment that demonstrates that behaviorally similar code of independent origin is highly unlikely to be syntactically similar. In fact, it is so syntactically different, that existing clone detection approaches cannot identify more than 1% of such redundancy. This is unfortunate, as manual inspections of open source software indicate that behaviorally similar code of independent origin does exist in practice and does present problems to maintenance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/CSMR.2010.33
Software Maintenance and Reengineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
controlled experiment,software maintenance,open source software,clone detection,syntactically similar redundant code,behaviorally similar code,code similarities beyond copy,clone detection tool,independent development,redundant source code,independent origin,cloning,detectors,redundancy,java,public domain software,inspection,source code
Programming language,Source code,Computer science,Redundant code,Redundancy (engineering),Controlled experiment,Software maintenance,Open source software,Java,Public domain software
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1534-5351 E-ISBN : 978-0-7695-4321-5
978-0-7695-4321-5
21
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.77
25
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Elmar Juergens174331.07
Florian Deissenboeck277035.84
Benjamin Hummel366029.51