Detecting functionally similar code within the same project
Ryo Tajima, Masataka Nagura, Shingo Takada · 2018
Multiple developers often take part in a software development project. Although these developers are collaborating towards the development within the same project, each developer creates code on their own. This may lead to duplicate or similar code appearing in different parts of the software. Such code should be removed to improve maintainability. This paper proposes an approach to automatically detect such code, which we shall call functionally similar code. The unit of detection is at the method level, and we focus on input/output and the method structure using program dependence graph. We show the results of applying our approach on open source software.