How Developers Copy

Author

Balint, Mihai ; Girba, Tudor G. ; Marinescu, Radu

Author_Institution

LOOSE Res. Group, Politehnica Univ. of Timisoara

fYear

0

fDate

0-0 0

Firstpage

56

Lastpage

68

Abstract

Copy-paste programming is dangerous as it may lead to hidden dependencies between different parts of the system. Modifying clones is not always straight forward, because we might not know all the places that need modification. This is even more of a problem when several developers need to know about how to change the clones. In this paper, we correlate the code clones with the time of the modification and with the developer that performed the modification to detect patterns of how developers copy from one another. We develop visualization, named clone evolution view, to represent the evolution of the duplicated code. We show the relevance of our approach on several large case studies and we distill our experience in forms of interesting copy patterns

Keywords

program diagnostics; program visualisation; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software prototyping; clone evolution view; code clone modification; copy-paste programming; duplicated code evolution; program visualization; Cloning; Computer languages; Displays; Information analysis; Pattern analysis; Quality assurance; Reverse engineering; Risk management; Shape; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Program Comprehension, 2006. ICPC 2006. 14th IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Athens

ISSN

1092-8138

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2601-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICPC.2006.25

Filename

1631105