Comparing Quality Metrics for Cloned and Non Cloned Java Methods: A Large Scale Empirical Study
Vaibhav Saini, Hitesh Sajnani, Cristina Videira Lopes · 2016
In this paper, we conduct a large scale statistical study to explore if there exists any difference between the quality of cloned methods and non cloned methods. The dataset consists of 4,421 open source Java projects containing 644,830 cloned and 842,052 non cloned methods. The study uses 27 software metrics as a proxy for quality, spanning across complexity, modularity, and documentation (code-comments) categories. We did not find any statistically significant difference (p0.1) between the quality of cloned and non cloned methods for most of the metrics, except for 3 metrics. We, however, found that the cloned methods are on an average 20% smaller than the non cloned methods.