A Survey

Copying a code fragment and reusing the same in several parts of the project is a common phenomenon in software project development. Statistics says about 5 % to 17 % of the system will contain duplicated code. Major disadvantage with the code duplication with or without minor modifications is debugging. A bug detected in a code fragment will be repeated in all its clones and debugger must investigate all these fragments for the same bug, refactoring of the repeated code is another issue in software maintenance. In this paper we survey the status of the clone detection research. First, we introduce few concepts and terms involved in code cloning, and categorization of clones. Second, we discussed few existing clone detection tools and their comparisons. Finally, this paper concludes with the problems related to clone detection research. 1