Title
Rule-directed code clone synchronization
Abstract
Code clones are prevalent in software systems due to many factors in software development. Detecting code clones and managing consistency between them along code evolution can be very useful for reducing clone-related bugs and maintenance costs. Despite some early attempts at detecting code clones and managing the consistency between them, the state-of-the-art tool can only handle simple code clones whose structures are identical or quite similar. However, existing empirical studies show that clones can have quite different structures with their evolution, which can easily go beyond the capability of the state-of-the-art tool. In this paper, we propose CCSync, a novel, rule-directed approach, which paves the structure differences between the code clones and synchronizes them even when code clones become quite different in their structures. The key steps of this approach are, given two code clones, to (1) extract a synchronization rule from the relationship between the clones, and (2) once one code fragment is updated, propagate the modifications to the other following the synchronization rule. We have implemented a tool for CCSync and evaluated its effectiveness on five Java projects. Our results shows that there are many code clones suitable for synchronization, and our tool achieves precisions of up to 92% and recalls of up to 84%. In particular, more than 76% of our generated revisions are identical with manual revisions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/ICPC.2016.7503722
2016 IEEE 24th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)
Keywords
Field
DocType
rule-directed code clone synchronization,software systems,software development,code evolution,clone-related bugs,maintenance costs,CCSync,rule-directed approach,synchronization rule,code fragment,Java projects,manual revisions
Code coverage,Static program analysis,Duplicate code,Programming language,Computer science,Source code,Code generation,Redundant code,Software development,Dead code
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
34
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiao Cheng1111.88
Hao Zhong2879.44
Yuting Chen319815.71
Zhenjiang Hu4134199.25
Jianjun Zhao593773.20