CnP: Towards an environment for the proactive management of copy-and-paste programming

Programmers copy and paste code for many reasons. Regardless of the specific reasons, similar code fragments (clones) are introduced into software systems. Like other software artifacts, clones may require attention and effort from programmers so that they can be understood, and correctly adapted and evolved. More specifically, when understanding and maintaining clones, programmers need to know where the clones are. Programmers also need to compare and contrast code clones in order to figure out how they correspond and differ. Finally, they also need to edit or remove clones. In addition to what clone detection-based tools can offer, more automated support is needed to better assist programmers in these activities. In this paper, we introduce a toolkit CnP that is aimed to support and manage clones proactively as they are created and evolved. We describe the initial features and the design decisions taken in CnP. We also discuss possible future design extension.