Toward a Code-Clone Search through the Entire Lifecycle of a Software Product

摘要

This paper presents a clone-detection method/tool currently under devel-opment. This tool is useful as a code-clone search through the entire lifecycle ofa software product; The tool searches code examples and analyzes of code clonesin both preventive and postmortem ways[LRHK10]. The approach is based on asequence equivalence on execution paths[Kam13] and extends the equivalence toinclude gaps, thus type-3[BKA + 07] clone detection. Each of the detected clones isa sub-sequence of an execution path of a given program, in other words, a set of codefragments of multiple procedures (methods) which can be executed in a run of theprogram. The approach is relaxed in terms of adaptability to incomplete (not-yet-finished) code, but also makes use of concrete information such as types (includinghierarchy) and dynamic dispatch when such information is available.