Clone detection and removal for Erlang/OTP within a refactoring environment
Huiqing Li, Simon Thompson · 2009
A well-known bad code smell in refactoring and software maintenance is duplicated code, or code clones. A code clone is a code fragment that is identical or similar to another. Unjustified code clones increase code size, make maintenance and comprehension more difficult, and also indicate design problems such as lack of encapsulation or abstraction.