Studying Late Propagations Using Software Repository Mining
Hsiao Hui Mui · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2010
While source code cloning is generally regarded as a bad software development strategy, there are, however, several studies which seem to indicate the contrary.One of the clone evolution patterns that can potentially lead to software defects is called the Late Propagation (LP).A LP occurs, when related clones are changed consistently, but not at the same time.The clone instance, which receives the update at a later time, might exhibit unintended behaviour if the modification was a bugfix.In this paper we present an approach to extract late propagations from software repositories.Using this approach, we will study LPs in four software system, which allows us to investigate the propagation time, commit activity and the effects of LPs.Finally, we present a number of suggestions to improve on the work done in this thesis.