Automatic Extract Clone Genealogy to Analysis Software Evolution Process
Chen Zhuo, Liping Zhang, Min Hou · International Journal of Security and Its Applications · 2017
Clone code is duplicate or similar code fragment, these duplicate codes from the copy and paste operation, such code are believed to reduce the maintainability of software severely.In this paper, we developed a clone genealogy extractor-ECG, which can accurately and quickly build Type-1, Type-2 and Type-3 clone genealogy.We examined four open source software, found that about 42% of clone code was not changed in the evolution process, and about 3.48% of clone code had inconsistent change, such clones may introduce potential bugs that need to be focused on.Experiments results show validity and high efficiency of clone genealogy extractor, which provides reference and data support for code clone quality assessment and management.