Managing the copy-and-paste programming practice in modern IDEs

ABSTRACT

Copy-and-paste is a common practice in industrial software development and maintenance, which results in code clones. Prior research has focused on automatically detecting and analyzing code clones from legacy systems and on eliminating clones. We believe that it is equally important to provide automated support in an integrated development environment (IDE) for the copy-and-paste practice when programs are being written. By instrumenting an IDE, the cloning relation among multiple copy-and-pasted code fragments will be tracked, thus obtaining a clone group. The commonality among members of a clone group will be extracted and represented as rules that capture code intent. We envision uses of the extracted rules for better software quality. Our CnP tool is currently targeted at Java and integrated into Eclipse. Empirical evaluation in terms of false positives, usefulness, and usability will be performed.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Integrated environments

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.5 Object-oriented Programming
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.3 Coding Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Object-oriented programming
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications
          Subjects: Object-oriented languages

Keywords:
Java, abstract syntax tree, code clone, code management, copy-and-paste programming, error detection, intent inference