Cross-Project Code Clone Consistency Prediction
Fanlong Zhang · 2019
There are large numbers of code clones in software, which are introduced by developers to speed software development. Due to the similarity of code clones, consistent change usually happens to code clones, which can lead to extra maintenance cost and/or consistent-defect. To address this problem, researchers have proposed approaches to predict the requirement of consistent change. Although their works have good predictive effectiveness within one project, there is not enough data to make such prediction at the beginning phase of development. Therefore, in this paper, we first try to make use of the data from cross-projects and propose an approach to predict cross-project clone consistency-requirement. We construct the experiments on four open-source projects, and the results show that the cross-project prediction can be employed for clone consistency prediction. What's more, we suggest that the scale of data have not a significant impact on the effectiveness prediction.