Can clone detection support quality assessments of requirements specifications?
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2
Code clone detection in practice
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2
Variant-preserving refactoring in feature-oriented software product lines
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software-Intensive Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Redundant source code hinders software maintenance, since updates have to be performed in multiple places. This holds independent of whether redundancy was created by copy&paste or by independent development of behaviorally similar code. Existing clone detection tools successfully discover syntactically similar redundant code. They thus work well for redundancy that has been created by copy&paste. But: how syntactically similar is behaviorally similar code of independent origin? This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment that demonstrates that behaviorally similar code of independent origin is highly unlikely to be syntactically similar. In fact, it is so syntactically different, that existing clone detection approaches cannot identify more than 1% of such redundancy. This is unfortunate, as manual inspections of open source software indicate that behaviorally similar code of independent origin does exist in practice and does present problems to maintenance.