Stability of COBOL Clones.
Jan Harder, Nils Göde, Marcus Rausch · 2011
Code clones are said to threaten the maintainability of software systems. Changes to one cloned fragment must be propagated to the other fragments, which might increase change effort. Hence, different studies have investigated the stability of cloned code and compared it to the stability of the non-cloned code. However, only open-source systems have been regarded so far. We conducted a study on two industrial COBOL systems, measuring the clone stability. In this paper, we present the results and compare them to the observations of the previous studies. 1