Hybrid Technique for Object Oriented Software Clone Detection

Abstract

Code cloning — duplication of source code is a major problem for large, industrial systems. The major consequence of cloning is that it risks the maintenance process. Cloning is the most basic means of software reuse. Code cloning has been very extensively used within the software development design community. Unofficial surveys carried out within large, long term software development projects suggest that 25-30% of the modules in this kind of system may have been cloned. A software clone is a code fragment identical or similar to another in the source code. Clones are considered harmful for software maintenance and evolution, because it increases complexity of the system. Detection of software clones decreases software maintenance costs and increases understandability of the system. Many code clone detection techniques have been proposed to detect clones. This thesis proposes a practical method, for detecting clones for large software system. The clones are detected by using hybrid approach. The novel aspect of the approach takes the advantage of metric based and text based techniques for clone detection. The proposed work is divided into two stages. In the first stage potential clones are selected on the basis of the metric match and in the second stage potential clones are further processed by text-based technique to determine whether two potential clones really are clone of each other.