Extract Function Clone Genealogies across Multiple Versions
Ying Tu, Liping Zhang, Chun-Hui Wang, Dongsheng Liu · International Journal of Security and Its Applications · 2015
Software systems often contain plenty of code clones, which bring significant impact on software development and maintenance.Tracking clones in the evolution process is essential to analyzing clones, since we cannot understand clone phenomenon well just rely on the clone detection results of single version.We developed a function clone genealogy extractor, cGen, which can track clones across multiple versions to extract type-1 and type-2 function clone genealogies.By using cGen, we examine nine open source C projects and analyze their evolution.Our study shows that cGen can efficiently extract clone genealogies from multiple versions of a project, and provide support for clone evolution analysis.