Design and Analysis of a Hybrid Technique for Code Clone Detection

Abstract: Nowadays, the software industry is getting more complex since the software systems are growing massively. In order to meet the software demand, a developer often reuses the existing code. This reuse of code results as a code cloning. Code cloning can be defined as a copying and pasting activity of code sections by doing a minor or no modification. These modifications can be done in terms of addition, removal, renaming. Tremendous demands from software industry could be one of the reasons for a developer to use the cloning beside his lazy behavior in writing a code from new scratch. Though the cloning reduces the development time and efforts but it impacts the maintenance cost of the software in terms of software readability and changeability. So, the demand for code clone detection arises in the software industry to improve the readability and changeability in software. A number of clone detection methods exist today to find out code clones in a software system. This paper presents a research work carried to design a hybrid technique that combines the metric based clone detection approaches with text-based clone detection approaches and gives a better result in accounts of precision, recall, and accuracy.

Keywords: Code clone, duplicate code, cloning, clone detection