research-article

A systematic literature review of clone evolution

Authors:

Yanzhi ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

CSSE '22: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering

Pages 461 - 473

https://doi.org/10.1145/3569966.3570091

Published: 20 December 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Code clones are identical or nearly similar code fragments often introduced into software systems by programmers with software modification and maintenance. During the evolution of the software system, code clones may experience multiple changes, such as the increase in number, disappearance, location change, etc. These changes increase the difficulty of clone management and possibly introduce bugs into the software, leading to the high price of clone management and maintenance. Therefore, it is necessary to study the clone evolution. In this paper, we summarize the research works in code clone evolution in recent decades. Based on the previous review and survey, we found a total of 47 relevant papers and divided them into five categories with the help of the LDA model. We present our analysis of the current research and discussion about the possible future progress in this paper. The final result of the debate is that we believe the future work will divide into two aspects. On the one hand, developing clone management tools based on the current results become a possible direction; on the other hand, development and improvement may appear in existing tools with more theoretical support due to more knowledge of the evolutionary characteristics of clones.

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Cited By

Sundelin AGonzalez-Huerta JTorkar RWnuk K(2025)Governing the commons: code ownership and code-clones in large-scale software developmentEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10598-730:2Online publication date: 1-Mar-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10598-7
Mo RJiang YZhan WWang DLi Z(2023)A Comprehensive Study on Code Clones in Automated Driving Software2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00053(1073-1085)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00053

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image ACM Other conferences

CSSE '22: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering

October 2022

753 pages

ISBN:9781450397780

DOI:10.1145/3569966

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 December 2022

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CSSE 2022: 2022 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering

October 21 - 23, 2022

Guilin, China

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Cited By

Sundelin AGonzalez-Huerta JTorkar RWnuk K(2025)Governing the commons: code ownership and code-clones in large-scale software developmentEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10598-730:2Online publication date: 1-Mar-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10598-7
Mo RJiang YZhan WWang DLi Z(2023)A Comprehensive Study on Code Clones in Automated Driving Software2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00053(1073-1085)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00053

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