Tool support for managing method clones

It is not always feasible to refactor or remove all clones in a system, either due to language limitations or other practical considerations. Meta-programming based reuse technique of VCL can effectively unify and manage clones at the meta-level for better maintenance, even in the presence of clones with differences that render them hard to unify using other language-based conventional techniques, or clones that are kept in the system for other purposes. In this paper, we present an automated tool that can unify method clones with VCL. We also discuss various patterns of cloned fragments contained in those methods, and how each pattern can be framed with VCL.