Empirical Results on Cloning and Clone Detection

Cloning means the use of copy-paste as method in developing software artefacts. This practice has several problems, such as unnecessary increase of these artefacts, and thereby increased comprehension and change efforts, as well as potential inconsistencies. The automatic detection of clones has been a topic for research for several years now and we have made huge progress in terms of precision and recall. This led to a series of empirical analyses we have performed on the effects and the amount of cloning in code, models and requirements. We continue to investigate the effects of cloning and work on extending clone detection to functionally similar code. This talk will give insights into how clone detection works and the empirical results we have gathered