A criterion for filtering code clone related bugs

ABSTRACT

Software reviews are time-consuming task especially for large software systems. To reduce the efforts required, Li et al. developed CP-Miner, a code clone detection tool that detects identifier naming inconsistencies between code clones as bug candidates. However, reviewers using CP-Miner still have to assess many inconsistencies, since the tool also reports many false-positive candidates. To reduce the false-positive candidates, we propose a criterion for filtering the candidates. In our experiments, filtering with the proposed criterion removed 30% of the false-positive candidates and no true-positive candidates. This result shows that the proposed criterion helps the review task by effectively reducing the number of bug candidates.

REFERENCES

• 1: Stefan Bellon , Rainer Koschke , Giulio Antoniol , Jens Krinke , Ettore Merlo, Comparison and Evaluation of Clone Detection Tools, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.33 n.9, p.577-591, September 2007 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2007.70725]
• 2: Toshihiro Kamiya , Shinji Kusumoto , Katsuro Inoue, CCFinder: a multilinguistic token-based code clone detection system for large scale source code, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.28 n.7, p.654-670, July 2002 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2002.1019480]
• 3: Zhenmin Li , Shan Lu , Suvda Myagmar , Yuanyuan Zhou, CP-Miner: Finding Copy-Paste and Related Bugs in Large-Scale Software Code, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.32 n.3, p.176-192, March 2006 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2006.28]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Code inspections and walk-throughs

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.8 Metrics

General Terms:
Experimentation

Keywords:
code clone, defect mining