Clones occurence in large object oriented software packages

  • Authors:

  • Michel Dagenais;Ettore Merlo;Bruno Laguë;Daniel Proulx

  • Affiliations:

  • Département de génie électrique et génie informatique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3A7;Département de génie électrique et génie informatique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3A7;Quality Engineering & Research, Bell Canada, 1050 Beaver Hall Hill (2nd floor), Montrééal, Québec, Canada, H2Z 1S4;Quality Engineering & Research, Bell Canada, 1050 Beaver Hall Hill (2nd floor), Montrééal, Québec, Canada, H2Z 1S4

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '98 Proceedings of the 1998 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Software engineers often build new procedures by cloning, copying an existing one with similar requirements, and slightly modifying it. While this may be easier than extracting the common part, and sharing it in a library, it increases the system size and often leads to higher maintenance costs. The occurrence of clones is highly dependent on the system architecture and development model, and has been studied in the past for a few large procedural systems.This paper studies the occurrence of clones in a large set of object oriented software libraries and programs (totaling 600 000 lines of code), and discusses the factors affecting the clone detection accuracy, and their frequency of occurrence.