Finding Code Clones for Refactoring with Clone Metrics: A Case Study of Open Source Software

摘要

A code clone is a code fragment that has identical or similar code fragments to it in the source code. Code clone has been regarded as one of the factors that makes software maintenance more difficult. Therefore, to refactor code clones into one method is promising way to reduce maintenance cost in the future. In our previous study, we proposed a method to extract code clones for refactoring using clone metrics. We had conducted an empirical study on Java application developed by NEC Corporation. It turned out that our proposed method is effective to extract refactoring candidate code clones. In this paper, we show the result of applying our proposed method into open source software systems.