Browsing by Author "Roy, Chanchal K."

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    Answering questions about unanswered questions of stack overflow
    (IEEE, 2013) Asaduzzaman, Muhammad; Mashiyat, Ahmed Shah; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.
    Community-based question answering services accumulate large volumes of knowledge through the voluntary services of people across the globe. Stack Overflow is an example of such a service that targets developers and software engineers. In general, questions in Stack Overflow are answered in a very short time. However, we found that the number of unanswered questions has increased significantly in the past two years. Understanding why questions remain unanswered can help information seekers improve the quality of their questions, increase their chances of getting answers, and better decide when to use Stack Overflow services. In this paper, we mine data on unanswered questions from Stack Overflow. We then conduct a qualitative study to categorize unanswered questions, which reveals characteristics that would be difficult to find otherwise. Finally, we conduct an experiment to determine whether we can predict how long a question will remain unanswered in Stack Overflow.
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    Comparative stability of cloned and non-cloned code: an empirical study
    (ACM, 2012) Mondal, Manishankar; Roy, Chanchal K.; Rahman, Md. Saidur; Saha, Ripon K.; Krinke, Jens; Schneider, Kevin A.
    Code cloning is a controversial software engineering practice due to contradictory claims regarding its effect on software maintenance. Code stability is a recently introduced measurement technique that has been used to determine the impact of code cloning by quantifying the changeability of a code region. Although most of the existing stability analysis studies agree that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code, the studies have two major flaws: (i) each study only considered a single stability measurement (e.g., lines of code changed, frequency of change, age of change); and, (ii) only a small number of subject systems were analyzed and these were of limited variety. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on code stability using three different stability measuring methods. We use a recently introduced hybrid clone detection tool, NiCAD, to detect the clones and analyze their stability in four dimensions: by clone type, by measuring method, by programming language, and by system size and age. Our four-dimensional investigation on 12 diverse subject systems written in three programming languages considering three clone types reveals that: (i) Type-1 and Type-2 clones are unstable, but Type-3 clones are not; (ii) clones in Java and C systems are not as stable as clones in C# systems; (iii) a system's development strategy might play a key role in defining its comparative code stability scenario; and, (iv) cloned and non-cloned regions of a subject system do not follow a consistent change pattern.
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    An empirical study on clone stability
    (ACM, 2012) Mondal, Manishankar; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.
    Code cloning is a controversial software engineering practice due to contradictory claims regarding its effect on software maintenance. Code stability is a recently introduced measurement technique that has been used to determine the impact of code cloning by quantifying the changeability of a code region. Although most existing stability analysis studies agree that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code, the studies have two major flaws: (i) each study only considered a single stability measurement (e.g., lines of code changed, frequency of change, age of change); and, (ii) only a small number of subject systems were analyzed and these were of limited variety. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on code stability using four different stability measuring methods. We use a recently introduced hybrid clone detection tool, NiCAD, to detect the clones and analyze their stability in different dimensions: by clone type, by measuring method, by programming language, and by system size and age. Our in-depth investigation on 12 diverse subject systems written in three programming languages considering three types of clones reveals that: (i) cloned code is generally less stable than non-cloned code, and more specifically both Type-1 and Type-2 clones show higher instability than Type-3 clones; (ii) clones in both Java and C systems exhibit higher instability compared to the clones in C# systems; (iii) a system's development strategy might play a key role in defining its comparative code stability scenario; and, (iv) cloned and non-cloned regions of a subject system do not follow any consistent change pattern.
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    Evaluating the Conventional Wisdom in Clone Removal: A Genealogy-based Empirical Study
    (ACM, 2013) Zibran, Minhaz F.; Saha, Ripon K.; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.
    Clone management has drawn immense interest from the research community in recent years. It is recognized that a deep understanding of how code clones change and are refactored is necessary for devising effective clone management tools and techniques. This paper presents an empirical study based on the clone genealogies from a significant number of releases of six software systems, to characterize the patterns of clone change and removal in evolving software systems. With a blend of qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and statistical tests of significance, we address a number of research questions. Our findings reveal insights into the removal of individual clone fragments and provide empirical evidence in support of conventional clone evolution wisdom. The results can be used to devise informed clone management tools and techniques.
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    Understanding the evolution of type-3 clones: an exploratory study
    (IEEE, 2013) Saha, Ripon K.; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.; Perry, Dewayne E.
    Understanding the evolution of clones is important for both understanding the maintenance implications of clones and for building a robust clone management system. To this end, researchers have already conducted a number of studies to analyze the evolution of clones, mostly focusing on Type-1 and Type-2 clones. However, although there are a significant number of Type-3 clones in software systems, we know a little how they actually evolve. In this paper, we perform an exploratory study on the evolution of Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3 clones in six open source software systems written in two different programming languages and compare the result with a previous study to better understand the evolution of Type-3 clones. Our results show that although Type-3 clones are more likely to change inconsistently, the absolute number of consistently changed Type-3 clone classes is greater than that of Type-1 and Type-2. Type-3 clone classes also have a lifespan similar to that of Type-1 and Type-2 clones. In addition, a considerable number of Type-1 and Type-2 clones convert into Type-3 clones during evolution. Therefore, it is important to manage type-3 clones properly to limit their negative impact. However, various automated clone management techniques such as notifying developers about clone changes or linked editing should be chosen carefully due to the inconsistent nature of Type-3 clones.
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    VisCad: Flexible Code Clone Analysis Support for NiCad
    (ACM, 2011) Asaduzzaman, Muhammad; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.
    Clone detector results can be better understood with tools that support visualization and facilitate in-depth analysis. In this tool demo paper we present VisCad, a comprehensive code clone analysis and visualization tool that provides such support for the near-miss hybrid clone detection tool, NiCad. Through carefully selectedmetrics and visualization techniques VisCad can guide users to explore the cloning of a system from different perspectives.
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    Visualizing the Evolution of Code Clones
    (ACM, 2011) Saha, Ripon K.; Roy, Chanchal K.; Schneider, Kevin A.
    The knowledge of code clone evolution throughout the history of a software system is essential in comprehending and managing its clones properly and cost-effectively. However, investigating and observing facts in a huge set of text-based data provided by a clone genealogy extractor could be challenging without the support of a visualization tool. In this position paper, we present an idea of visualizing code clone evolution by exploiting the advantages of existing clone visualization techniques that would be both scalable and useful.