Studying the Impact of Clones on Software Defects

Authors:
Gehan M. K. Selim;Liliane Barbour;Weiyi Shang;Bram Adams;Ahmed E. Hassan;Ying Zou
Affiliations:
-;-;-;-;-;-
Venue:
WCRE '10 Proceedings of the 2010 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
Year:
2010

Citing 0
Cited 4

Is cloned code older than non-cloned code?

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Clones
Clones: what is that smell?

Empirical Software Engineering
Using Pig as a data preparation language for large-scale mining software repositories studies: An experience report

Journal of Systems and Software
An empirical study of the fault-proneness of clone mutation and clone migration

Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

There are numerous studies that examine whether or not cloned code is harmful to software systems. Yet, few of them study which characteristics of cloned code in particular lead to software defects. In our work, we use survival analysis to understand the impact of clones on software defects and to determine the characteristics of cloned code that have the highest impact on software defects. Our survival models express the risk of defects in terms of basic predictors inherent to the code (e.g., LOC) and cloning predictors (e.g., number of clone siblings). We perform a case study using two clone detection tools on two large, long-lived systems using survival analysis. We determine that the defect-proneness of cloned methods is specific to the system under study and that more resources should be directed towards methods with a longer 'commit history'.