Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection, has been a very active area of research in recent years. Up to now, however, no substantial investigation of the consequences of code cloning on program correctness has been carried out. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper presents the results of a large-scale case study that was undertaken to find out if inconsistent changes to cloned code can indicate faults. For the analyzed commercial and open source systems we not only found that inconsistent changes to clones are very frequent but also identified a significant number of faults induced by such changes. The clone detection tool used in the case study implements a novel algorithm for the detection of inconsistent clones. It is available as open source to enable other researchers to use it as basis for further investigations.
Juergens et al. REF find, after manual inspection of clones in four industrial and one open source system, that inconsistent changes to clones are very frequent and can lead to significant numbers of faults in software.
Do Code Clones Matter?
Proc. 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '09). IEEE, 2009
Computer Science