An empirical study on clone stability

Code cloning is a controversial software engineering practice due to contradictory claims regarding its effect on software maintenance. Code stability is a recently introduced mea-surement technique that has been used to determine the impact of code cloning by quantifying the changeability of a code region. Although most existing stability analysis stud-ies agree that cloned code is more stable than non-cloned code, the studies have two major flaws: (i) each study only considered a single stability measurement (e.g., lines of code changed, frequency of change, age of change); and, (ii) only a small number of subject systems were analyzed and these were of limited variety. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on code stability using four different stability measuring meth