Clonepedia: Summarizing code clones by common syntactic context for software maintenance

Yun Lin, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Peng, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Wenyun Zhao, Jinsong Dong

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Code clones have to be made explicit and be managed in software maintenance. Researchers have developed many clone detection tools to detect and analyze code clones in software systems. These tools report code clones as similar code fragments in source files. However, clone-related maintenance tasks (e.g., refactorings) often involve a group of code clones appearing in larger syntactic context (e.g., code clones in sibling classes or code clones calling similar methods). Given a list of low-level code-fragment clones, developers have to manually summarize from bottom up low-level code clones that are relevant to the syntactic context of a maintenance task. In this paper, we present a clone summarization technique to summarize code clones with respect to their common syntactic context. The clone summarization allows developers to locate and maintain code clones in a top-down manner by type hierarchy and usage dependencies. We have implemented our approach in the Clonepedia tool and conducted a user study on JHotDraw with 16 developers. Our results show that Clonepedia users can better locate and refactor code clones, compared with developers using the CloneDetective tool.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2014
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages341-350
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9780769553030
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 4 Dec 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2014 - Victoria, Canada
Duration: 28 Sept 20143 Oct 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings - 30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2014

Conference

Conference30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2014
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVictoria
Period28/09/143/10/14

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