Searching for better configurations: a rigorous approach to clone evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Tiantian Wang;Mark Harman;Yue Jia;Jens Krinke

  • Affiliations:

  • Harbin Institute of Technology, China;University College London, UK;University College London, UK;University College London, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Clone detection finds application in many software engineering activities such as comprehension and refactoring. However, the confounding configuration choice problem poses a widely-acknowledged threat to the validity of previous empirical analyses. We introduce desktop and parallelised cloud-deployed versions of a search based solution that finds suitable configurations for empirical studies. We evaluate our approach on 6 widely used clone detection tools applied to the Bellon suite of 8 subject systems. Our evaluation reports the results of 9.3 million total executions of a clone tool; the largest study yet reported. Our approach finds significantly better configurations (p