Design and development of an efficient software clone detection technique

Abstract

Reusing software by means of copy and paste is a frequent activity in software development. In source code and other software artifacts, the original (code) fragment is copied and pasted with or without modifications. The pasted (code) fragment is said to be a clone and this activity is known as (code) cloning. The presence of code clones in the software may increase the post implementation maintenance (preventive and adaptive) effort. Code cloning increases the probability of bug propagation. Software clones are classified depending upon the type of similarity between two code fragments and the level of granularity. There are many reasons which promote software cloning. Complexity of the large systems makes it difficult for the software developer to understand the functionality. It promotes copying the existing functionality and logic. Sometimes programmers are forced to copy and paste code due to limitations of code reuse in programming languages. Moreover, programmers often fear to bring in new ideas in existing software. It is easier to reuse the existing code than to develop a fresh solution since new code may introduce new errors. There is an urgent need to detect clones in various software artifacts. Now-a-days, model driven development has become standard industry practice, so the objective of the proposed work is to detect clones in object oriented systems by using Unified Modeling Language (UML) models. In the proposed work, two techniques are presented to detect clones in UML models. In our work, we surveyed wide range of literature. 213 articles out of a collection of 2039 are surveyed using the standard systematic literature review guidelines. We put an emphasis on clone management, model clones, and semantic clones and classified the literature in different key areas. The focus of our survey is broader than the earlier surveys and includes the latest research work related to software clones.