Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Context-Based Detection Of Clone-Related Bugs, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, Edwin Chiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studies show that programs contain much similar code, commonly known as clones. One of the main reasons for introducing clones is programmers' tendency to copy and paste code to quickly duplicate functionality. We commonly believe that clones can make programs difficult to maintain and introduce subtle bugs. Although much research has proposed techniques for detecting and removing clones to improve software maintainability, little has considered how to detect latent bugs introduced by clones. In this paper, we introduce a general notion of context-based inconsistencies among clones and develop an efficient algorithm to detect such inconsistencies for locating bugs. We have …