A taxonomy of clones in source code: The reengineers most wanted list

Code cloning — that is, the gratuitous duplication of source code within a software system — is an endemic problem in large, industrial systems [6, 5]. While there has been much research into techniques for clone detec-tion and analysis, there has been relatively little empiri-cal study on characterizing how, where, and why clones occur in industrial software systems. Our current re-search is to perform an in-depth analysis of code cloning in real software systems and to build a taxonomy of types of code duplication. Code duplication, or code cloning, is generally be-lieved to be common in software systems [6, 10, 12, 11, 8, 1, 5]. Various problems are associated with code du-plication, including increased code size and increase