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An extended assessment of type-3 clones as detected by state-of-the-art tools

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Abstract

Code reuse through copying and pasting leads to so-called software clones. These clones can be roughly categorized into identical fragments (type-1 clones), fragments with parameter substitution (type-2 clones), and similar fragments that differ through modified, deleted, or added statements (type-3 clones). Although there has been extensive research on detecting clones, detection of type-3 clones is still an open research issue due to the inherent vagueness in their definition. In this paper, we analyze type-3 clones detected by state-of-the-art tools and investigate type-3 clones in terms of their syntactic differences. Then, we derive their underlying semantic abstractions from their syntactic differences. Finally, we investigate whether there are code characteristics that indicate that a tool-suggested clone candidate is a real type-3 clone from a human’s perspective. Our findings can help developers of clone detectors and clone refactoring tools to improve their tools.

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Notes

  1. The semantic information is not needed here.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank Pierre Frenzel for sharing his validated clones with us. Furthermore, we want to thank our industrial partner for giving us the opportunity to analyze industrial code of a software product line and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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  1. University of Bremen, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Rebecca Tiarks, Rainer Koschke & Raimar Falke

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  1. Rebecca Tiarks
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  2. Rainer Koschke
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  3. Raimar Falke
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Correspondence to Rainer Koschke.

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Tiarks, R., Koschke, R. & Falke, R. An extended assessment of type-3 clones as detected by state-of-the-art tools. Software Qual J 19, 295–331 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-010-9115-6

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