Cleaning up copy–paste clones with interactive merging
Narasimhan, Krishna ; Reichenbach, Christoph LU
and Lawall, Julia
(2018)
In Automated Software Engineering
25(3).
p.627-673
- Abstract
Copy-paste-modify is a form of software reuse in which developers explicitly duplicate source code. This duplicated source code, amounting to a code clone, is adapted for a new purpose. Copy-paste-modify is popular among software developers, however, empirical evidence shows that it complicates software maintenance and increases the frequency of bugs. To allow developers to use copy-paste-modify without having to worry about these concerns, we propose an approach that automatically merges similar pieces of code by creating suitable abstractions. Because different kinds of abstractions may be beneficial in different contexts, our approach offers multiple abstraction mechanisms, which were selected based on a study of popular open-source... (More)
Copy-paste-modify is a form of software reuse in which developers explicitly duplicate source code. This duplicated source code, amounting to a code clone, is adapted for a new purpose. Copy-paste-modify is popular among software developers, however, empirical evidence shows that it complicates software maintenance and increases the frequency of bugs. To allow developers to use copy-paste-modify without having to worry about these concerns, we propose an approach that automatically merges similar pieces of code by creating suitable abstractions. Because different kinds of abstractions may be beneficial in different contexts, our approach offers multiple abstraction mechanisms, which were selected based on a study of popular open-source repositories. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have designed and implemented a prototype merging tool for C++ and evaluated it on a number of code clones exhibiting some variation, i.e., near-miss clones, in popular Open Source packages. We observed that maintainers find our algorithmically created abstractions to be largely preferable to the existing duplicated code.
(Less)
- author
- Narasimhan, Krishna
; Reichenbach, Christoph
LU
and Lawall, Julia
- organization
- publishing date
- 2018-09
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- published
- subject
- keywords
- Clone management, Program analysis, Source code analysis, Static analysis
- in
- Automated Software Engineering
- volume
- 25
- issue
- 3
- pages
- 627 - 673
- publisher
- Springer
- external identifiers
-
- scopus:85049609502
- ISSN
- 0928-8910
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10515-018-0238-5
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- 0e7a34fc-1a9f-46e4-8f34-198cb3fbee52
- date added to LUP
- 2018-07-20 11:31:47
- date last changed
- 2023-02-27 12:48:39
@article{0e7a34fc-1a9f-46e4-8f34-198cb3fbee52,
abstract = {{<p>Copy-paste-modify is a form of software reuse in which developers explicitly duplicate source code. This duplicated source code, amounting to a code clone, is adapted for a new purpose. Copy-paste-modify is popular among software developers, however, empirical evidence shows that it complicates software maintenance and increases the frequency of bugs. To allow developers to use copy-paste-modify without having to worry about these concerns, we propose an approach that automatically merges similar pieces of code by creating suitable abstractions. Because different kinds of abstractions may be beneficial in different contexts, our approach offers multiple abstraction mechanisms, which were selected based on a study of popular open-source repositories. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have designed and implemented a prototype merging tool for C++ and evaluated it on a number of code clones exhibiting some variation, i.e., near-miss clones, in popular Open Source packages. We observed that maintainers find our algorithmically created abstractions to be largely preferable to the existing duplicated code.</p>}},
author = {{Narasimhan, Krishna and Reichenbach, Christoph and Lawall, Julia}},
issn = {{0928-8910}},
keywords = {{Clone management; Program analysis; Source code analysis; Static analysis}},
language = {{eng}},
number = {{3}},
pages = {{627--673}},
publisher = {{Springer}},
series = {{Automated Software Engineering}},
title = {{Cleaning up copy–paste clones with interactive merging}},
url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10515-018-0238-5}},
doi = {{10.1007/s10515-018-0238-5}},
volume = {{25}},
year = {{2018}},
}