A Feature Analysis of Co-changed Code Clone by Using Clone Metrics
Myrizki SANDHI YUDHA, Asano Ryohei, Hirohisa Aman · IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences · 2012
Code clones are duplicated or similar code fragments, and they have been known as major entities affecting the software maintainability. Sometimes there are “co-changes” in pair of code clones: when a code fragment is changed, the clone of the fragment is also changed. Such a co-change is one of key event to discuss the successful management of code clone. This paper analyzes the trends of co-changed code clones by using the length and the content of code clones. The empirical results show that: (1) there would be a specific length of clone to be mostly co-changed (around 60-100 tokens), and (2) code clones without any “control flow keywords” have a higher possibility to be co-changed than the others.