Duplicated code or code clones are a kind of code smell that have both positive and negative impacts on the development and maintenance of software systems. Software clone research in the past mostly focused on the detection and analysis of code clones, while research in recent years extends to the whole spectrum of clone management. In the last decade, three surveys appeared in the literature, which cover the detection, analysis, and evolutionary characteristics of code clones. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the state of the art in clone management, with in-depth investigation of clone management activities (e.g., tracing, refactoring, cost-benefit analysis) beyond the detection and analysis. This is the first survey on clone management, where we point to the achievements so far, and reveal avenues for further research necessary towards an integrated clone management system. We believe that we have done a good job in surveying the area of clone management and that this work may serve as a kind of roadmap for future research in the area
When many clones are detected in software programs, not all clones are equally important to developers. To help developers refactor code and improve software quality, various tools were built to recommend clone-removal refactorings based on the past and the present information, such as the cohesion degree of individual clones or the co-evolution relations of clone peers. The existence of these tools inspired us to build an approach that considers as many factors as possible to more accurately recommend clones. This paper introduces CREC, a learning-based approach that recommends clones by extr…
The reuse of code fragments by copying and pasting is widely practiced in software development and results in code clones. Cloning is considered an anti-pattern as it negatively affects program correctness and increases maintenance efforts. Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) software is no exception in the code clone discussion as reuse in development and maintenance is frequently achieved through copy, paste, and modification. Even though the presence of code clones may not necessary be a problem per se, it is important to detect, track and manage clones as the software system evolves. Unfor…
Customization is a general trend in software engineering, demanding systems that support variable stakeholder requirements. Two opposing strategies are commonly used to create variants: software clone & own and software configuration with an integrated platform. Organizations often start with the former, which is cheap, agile, and supports quick innovation, but does not scale. The latter scales by establishing an integrated platform that shares software assets between variants, but requires high up-front investments or risky migration processes. So, could we have a method that allows an easy t…
Software clones have been an active area of research for the past two decades. However, although numerous clone detection tools are now available, only a small fraction of the literature has focused on tool evaluation, and this is in fact still an open problem. This is mostly due to the fact that standard information retrieval metrics such as recall and precision require a priori knowledge of clones already in the system. Detection tools also typically have a large number of parameters which are difficult to fine-tune for optimal performance on a particular software system, and different outpu…
Software systems are getting more complex as the system grows where maintaining such system is a primary concern for the industry. Code clone is one of the factors making software maintenance more difficult. It is a process of replicating code blocks by copy-and-paste that is common in software development. In the beginning stage of the project, developers find it easy and time consuming though it has crucial drawbacks in the long run. There are two types of researchers where some researchers think clones lead to additional changes during maintenance phase, in later stage increase the overall …
The application of code clone technology accelerates code search, improves code reuse efficiency, and assists in software quality assessment and code vulnerability detection. However, the application of code clones also introduces software quality issues and increases the cost of software maintenance. As an important research field in software engineering, code clone has been extensively explored and studied by researchers, and related studies on various sub-research fields have emerged, including code clone detection, code clone evolution, code clone analysis, etc. However, there lacks a comp…
Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and facilitate program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While much effort has been dedicated to detecting bad smells, such as clones in code, little work has focused on comments. In this paper we present our solution to detect clones in comments that developers should fix. RepliComment can automatically analyze Java projects and report instances of copy-and-paste errors in comments, and can point developers to which comments should be fixed. Moreover, it can report when …
Deep Learning applications are becoming increasingly popular. Developers of deep learning systems strive to write more efficient code. Deep learning systems are constantly evolving, imposing tighter development timelines and increasing complexity, which may lead to bad design decisions. A copy-paste approach is widely used among deep learning developers because they rely on common frameworks and duplicate similar tasks. Developers often fail to properly propagate changes to all clones fragments during a maintenance activity. To our knowledge, no study has examined code cloning practices in dee…
Code clones are duplicate code fragments that share (nearly) similar syntax or semantics. Code clone detection plays an important role in software maintenance, code refactoring, and reuse. A substantial amount of research has been conducted in the past to detect clones. A majority of these approaches use lexical and syntactic information to detect clones. However, only a few of them target semantic clones. Recently, motivated by the success of deep learning models in other fields, including natural language processing and computer vision, researchers have attempted to adopt deep learning techn…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；itestra GmbH（itestra有限公司）
Due to their pivotal role in software engineering, considerable effort is spent on the quality assurance of software requirements specifications. As they are mainly described in natural language, relatively few means of automated quality assessment exist. However, we found that clone detection, a technique widely applied to source code, is promising to assess one important quality aspect in an automated way, namely redundancy that stems from copy&paste operations. This paper describes a large-scale case study that applied clone detection to 28 requirements specifications with a total of 8,667 …
Software developers embed logging statements inside the source code as an imperative duty in modern software development as log files are necessary for tracking down runtime system issues and troubleshooting system management tasks. Prior research has emphasized the importance of logging statements in the operation and debugging of software systems. However, the current logging process is mostly manual and ad hoc, and thus, proper placement and content of logging statements remain as challenges. To overcome these challenges, methods that aim to automate log placement and log content, i.e., 'wh…
Automated production systems (aPS) are highly customized systems that consist of hardware and software. Such aPS are controlled by a programmable logic controller (PLC), often in accordance with the IEC 61131-3 standard that divides system implementation into so-called program organization units (POUs) as the smallest software unit and is comprised of multiple textual and graphical programming languages that can be arbitrarily nested. A common practice during the development of such systems is reusing implementation artifacts by copying, pasting, and then modifying code. This approach is refer…
Contemporary software documentation is as complicated as the software itself. During its lifecycle, the documentation accumulates a lot of near duplicate fragments, i.e. chunks of text that were copied from a single source and were later modified in different ways. Such near duplicates decrease documentation quality and thus hamper its further utilization. At the same time, they are hard to detect manually due to their fuzzy nature. In this paper we give a formal definition of near duplicates and present an algorithm for their detection in software documents. This algorithm is based on the exa…
Defect detection at commit check-in time prevents the introduction of defects into software systems. Current defect detection approaches rely on metric-based models which are not very accurate and whose results are not directly useful for developers. We propose a method to detect bug-inducing commits by comparing the incoming changes with all past commits in the project, considering both those that introduced defects and those that did not. Our method considers individual changes in the commit separately, at the method-level granularity. Doing so helps developers as they are informed of specif…
Software developers embed logging statements inside the source code as an imperative duty in modern software development as log files are necessary for tracking down runtime system issues and troubleshooting system management tasks. However, the current logging process is mostly manual, and thus, proper placement and content of logging statements remain as challenges. To overcome these challenges, methods that aim to automate log placement and predict its content, i.e., 'where and what to log', are of high interest. Thus, we focus on predicting the location (i.e., where) and description (i.e.,…
Classic clone detection approaches are hardly capable of finding redundant code that has been developed independently, i.e., is not the result of copy&paste. To automatically detect such functionally similar code of independent origin, we experimented with a dynamic detection approach that applies random testing to selected chunks of code similar to Jiang&Su's approach. We found that such an approach faces several limitations in its application to diverse Java systems. This paper details on our insights regarding these challenges of dynamic detection of functionally similar code fragments. Our…
Service Oriented Architecture A Revolution for Project Management Software has changed the way projects today are moving on the fly with the help of web services booming the industry. Service oriented architecture improves performance and the communication between the distributed and remote teams. Web Services to Provide Project Management software the visibility and control of the application development lifecycle-giving a better control over the entire development process, from the management stage through development. The goal of Service Oriented Architecture for Project Management Software…
Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness. Once sub-optimal code is unknowingly (or knowingly) integrated into the codebase of software systems, its accumulation may lead to large maintenance costs and technical debt. Stack Overflow is a popular website for programmers to ask questions and share their code snippets. The crowdsourced and collaborative nature of Stack Overflow has created a large source …
Pre-compiled binary packages provide a convenient way of efficiently distributing software that has been adopted by most Linux package management systems. However, the heterogeneity of the Linux ecosystem, combined with the growing number of R extensions available, poses a scalability problem. As a result, efforts to bring binary R packages to Linux have been scattered, and lack a proper mechanism to fully integrate them with R's package manager. This work reviews past and present of binary distribution for Linux, and presents a path forward by showcasing the `cran2copr' project, an RPM-based …
IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；T.J.Watson Research Center（托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
In the past decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a part of our daily lives due to major advances in Machine Learning (ML) techniques. In spite of an explosive growth in the raw AI technology and in consumer facing applications on the internet, its adoption in business applications has conspicuously lagged behind. For business/mission-critical systems, serious concerns about reliability and maintainability of AI applications remain. Due to the statistical nature of the output, software 'defects' are not well defined. Consequently, many traditional quality management techniques such a…
With the recent advancement of technologies over the past year, IoT has become a paradigm in which devices communicate with each other and the cloud to achieve various applications in multidisciplinary fields. However, developing, deploying, and experimenting with IoT applications are still tedious, expensive, and time-consuming due to the factors like heterogeneity of hardware and software. This is where an IoT testbed plays a vital role in aiding developers to test their applications without being deploying it to the target environment. In this paper, we present a testbed that is scalable fo…
