Search

Software clone detection is an emerging research area in the field of software engineering. Software systems are subjected to continuous modifications in source code to improve the performance of the software, which may lead to code redundancy. Duplicate code/code clone is a piece of code reworked several times in software programs due to copy paste activity or reusability of existing software. Code clone is a prime subject in software evolution. Detection of software clones at the time of software evolution may improve the performance of software and reduce the maintenance cost and effort. This paper proposes metric based methods to detect code clones, as software clone is a universal problem in large scale programming environment. This paper introduces two metric based approaches to detect code clones by comparing (i) Control Statement Features (ii) Program Features like different types of statements, operators and operands. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets, C projects of Bellon's benchmark dataset and student lab programs (SLP).The methods efficiently identify similar functional clones. Proposed models only find similarity of whole programs but intelligent enough to highlight similar code segments across program files.

In this paper, we propose a method to detect duplicate codes based on structure and content of control statements present in the source codes. The proposed method efficiently finds all types of clones. Similarity between two programs is identified by comparing metrics of programs. Metric of a program is computed using control statements, operators and operands present in the program. Proposed method is independent of programming languages. This approach is also useful to detect plagiarized programs in academic environment.

In this work we address code clone or duplicated code detection which is one of the major factors that degrades the design and structure of software and lowers the software qualities such as readability, changeability and maintainability. Copying and pasting source code is common practice to reuse the software. While doing so, it is unlikely that structure of control statements is altered. The proposed method aims at detecting segments that have similar control statement structure. The method is language independent and can be executed on C, C++ or Java. The method can efficiently identify structurally similar clones.