No clones, no trouble?

In the last years research has focused on various fields of software clones, though there exists only a vague idea of costs and benefits. Without substantial research on the economic consequences of software clones, clone management will remain a questionable or even risky activity. Knowing how much effort is spent over the lifetime of a program to maintain source code that has been introduced in consequence of a deliberate clone removal might provide useful information in this respect. In this paper I present a framework to track code fragments that have been introduced by refactorings performed to remove existing code duplications. Tracking such code over time allows to investigate different aspects, for instance change frequency, that provide valuable insights regarding ongoing maintenance costs.