A controlled experiment on software clones

Author

Harder, Jan ; Tiarks, Rebecca

Author_Institution

Univ. of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

fYear

2012

fDate

11-13 June 2012

Firstpage

219

Lastpage

228

Abstract

Most software systems contain sections of duplicated source code - clones - that are believed to make maintenance more difficult. Recent studies tested this assumption by retrospective analyses of software archives. While giving important insights, the analysis of historical data relies only on snapshots and misses the human interaction in between. We conducted a controlled experiment to investigate how clones affect the programmer´s performance in common bug-fixing tasks. While our results do not exhibit a decisive difference in the time needed to correct cloned bugs, we observed many cases in which cloned bugs were not corrected completely.

Keywords

data analysis; operating systems (computers); program compilers; program debugging; bug fixing tasks; controlled experiment; duplicated source code clones; historical data analysis; human interaction; operating systems; programmers performance; retrospective analyses; software archives; software clones; software systems; Cloning; Computer bugs; Games; Maintenance engineering; Programming; Software; Switches;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2012 IEEE 20th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Passau

ISSN

1092-8138

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1213-4

Electronic_ISBN

1092-8138

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICPC.2012.6240491

Filename

6240491