A Research on Evolution of Repeated Code in Program Source Code
Ayaka Imazato, Yui Sasaki, Yoshiki Higo, Shinji Kusumoto · Technical report of IEICE. SS · 2013
Studies on evolution of code clone have confirmed that when one code fragment is modified, other code fragments that are similar to or identical to it also require the same modifications frequently. Therefore it is said that code clone increases workload for source code modifications. On the other hand, as a kind of code clone, there is a plenty of repeated code in source code. Repeated code means consecutive code fragments that consist of the same instructions. In this study, we tracked repeated code in source code and investigated its evolution. As a result, we revealed that, the less elements repeated code has, the more likely all the elements of it be modified simultaneously.