Interface Driven Code Clone Detection
Md Rakib Hossain Misu, Kazi Muheymin Sakib · 2017
Code cloning is a common code reusing technique that occurs when developers replicate similar pieces of code fragments within or between software repositories. Another replication happens when developers repeat method interfaces (i.e., method name, return and parameter types). Two methods are prone to be cloned when those have similar interfaces and perform similar functionalities. Considering this, a new lightweight Interface Driven Code Clone Detection (IDCCD) technique is proposed, that can detect clones by using method interface similarities. First, the method blocks are tokenized from the source files. For those method block tokens, interface information is extracted and indexed with mapped tokens. Then, similar interfaces are queried from that index and compared those with a similarity function for detecting clones. IDCCD is evaluated with other state of the art techniques by using BigCloneEval framework. The experimental results show that IDCCD performs similar comparing to other existing tools with a lower complexity.