We have all of the clones, now what? Toward integrating clone analysis into software quality assessment

摘要

Cloning might seems to be an unconventional way of designing and developing software, yet it is very widely practised in industrial development. The cloning research community has made substantial progress on modeling, detecting, and analyzing software clones. Although there is continuing discussion on the real role of clones on software quality, our community may agree on the need for advancing clone management techniques. Current clone management techniques concentrate on providing editing tools that allow developers to easily inspect clone instances, track their evolution, and check change consistency. In this position paper, we argue that better clone management can be achieved by responding to the fundamental needs of industry practitioners. And the possible research directions include a software problem-oriented taxonomy of clones, and a better structured clone detection report. We believe this line of research should inspire new techniques, and reach to a much wider range of professionals from both the research and industry community.