Browsing by Author "Saha, R.K."

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    An automatic framework for extracting and classifying near-miss clone genealogies
    (IEEE, 2011) Saha, R.K.; Roy, C.K.; Schneider, K.A.
    Extracting code clone genealogies across multiple versions of a program and classifying them according to their change patterns underlies the study of code clone evolution. While there are a few studies in the area, the approaches do not handle near-miss clones well and the associated tools are often computationally expensive. To address these limitations, we present a framework for automatically extracting both exact and near-miss clone genealogies across multiple versions of a program and for identifying their change patterns using a few key similarity factors. We have developed a prototype clone genealogy extractor, applied it to three open source projects including the Linux Kernel, and evaluated its accuracy in terms of precision and recall. Our experience shows that the prototype is scalable, adaptable to different clone detection tools, and can automatically identify evolution patterns of both exact and near-miss clones by constructing their genealogies.
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    An Empirical Study of the Impacts of Clones in Software Maintenance
    (IEEE, 2011) Mondal, M.; Rahman, M.S.; Saha, R.K.; Krinke, J.; Schneider, K.A.
    The impacts of clones on software maintenance is a long-lived debate on whether clones are beneficial or not. Some researchers argue that clones lead to additional changes during the maintenance phase and thus increase the overall maintenance effort. Moreover, they note that inconsistent changes to clones may introduce faults during evolution. On the other hand, other researchers argue that cloned code exhibits more stability than non-cloned code. Studies resulting in such contradictory outcomes may be a consequence of using different methodologies, using different clone detection tools, defining different impact assessment metrics, and evaluating different subject systems. In order to understand the conflicting results from the studies, we plan to conduct a comprehensive empirical study using a common framework incorporating nine existing methods that yielded mostly contradictory findings. Our research strategy involves implementing each of these methods using four clone detection tools and evaluating the methods on more than fifteen subject systems of different languages and of a diverse nature. We believe that our study will help eliminate tool and study biases to resolve conflicts regarding the impacts of clones on software maintenance.
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    Evaluating Code Clone Genealogies at Release Level: An Empirical Study
    (IEEE, 2010) Saha, R.K.; Asaduzzaman, M.; Zibran, M.F.; Roy, C.K.; Schneider, K.A.
    Code clone genealogies show how clone groups evolve with the evolution of the associated software system, and thus could provide important insights on the maintenance implications of clones. In this paper, we provide an in-depth empirical study for evaluating clone genealogies in evolving open source systems at the release level. We develop a clone genealogy extractor, examine 17 open source C, Java, C++ and C# systems of diverse varieties and study different dimensions of how clone groups evolve with the evolution of the software systems. Our study shows that majority of the clone groups of the clone genealogies either propagate without any syntactic changes or change consistently in the subsequent releases, and that many of the genealogies remain alive during the evolution. These findings seem to be consistent with the findings of a previous study that clones may not be as detrimental in software maintenance as believed to be (at least by many of us), and that instead of aggressively refactoring clones, we should possibly focus on tracking and managing clones during the evolution of software systems.