Paper Info
Title
Do code clones matter?
Abstract
Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection, has been a very active area of research in recent years. Up to now, however, no substantial investigation of the consequences of code cloning on program correctness has been carried out. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper presents the results of a large-scale case study that was undertaken to find out if inconsistent changes to cloned code can indicate faults. For the analyzed commercial and open source systems we not only found that inconsistent changes to clones are very frequent but also identified a significant number of faults induced by such changes. The clone detection tool used in the case study implements a novel algorithm for the detection of inconsistent clones. It is available as open source to enable other researchers to use it as basis for further investigations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/ICSE.2009.5070547
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
program compilers,program verification,public domain software,software fault tolerance,software maintenance,clone detection,code cloning,code duplication,commercial system,defect-prone,maintenance cost,open source system,program correctness,system faults
Evolution biology,Distance measurement,Duplicate code,Computer science,Correctness,Software fault tolerance,Real-time computing,Software maintenance,Public domain software
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
abs/1701.05472
0270-5257
978-1-4244-3453-4
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
203
5.51
28
Authors
4
Search Limit
100203
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Elmar Juergens174331.07
Florian Deissenboeck277035.84
Benjamin Hummel366029.51
Stefan Wagner474855.74