Code Clone Analysis Method for Practical Refactoring Support

摘要

Recently, code clone has been regarded as one of factors that make software maintenance more difficult. A code clone is a code fragment in a source code that is identical or similar to another. For example, if we modify a code fragment which has code clones, it is necessary to consider whether we have to modify each of its code clones. There are two ways of maintenance support for code clones. One is to comprehend and manage code clones, and the other is to remove them. For the former support, we have developed code clone analysis environment Gemini. For the latter support, several methods have proposed. But. it is difficult to apply them to industrial software because of various reasons such as high time complexity. In this paper, we propose a method that detects refactoring-oriented code clone in practical use time. And, we develop a characterization of code clones by some metrics, which suggest how to remove them. Then, we develop refactoring support tool Cancer. We expect Cancer can support software maintenance more effectively.