A Comparative Study of Software Bugs in Clone and Non-Clone Code
Judith F. Islam, Manishankar Mondal, Chanchal Kumar Roy, Kevin A. Schneider · Proceedings/Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2017
Code cloning is a recurrent operation in everyday software development.Whether it is a good or bad practice is an ongoing debate among researchers and developers for the last few decades.In this paper, we conduct a comparative study on bugproneness in clone code and non-clone code by analyzing commit logs.According to our inspection on thousands of revisions of seven diverse subject systems, the percentage of changed files due to bug-fix commits is significantly higher in clone code compared with non-clone code.We perform a Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) test to show the statistical significance of our findings.Finally, the possibility of severe bugs occurring is higher in clone code than in non-clone code.Bug-fixing changes affecting clone code should be considered more carefully.According to our findings, clone code appears to be more bug-prone than non-clone code.