On software maintenance process improvement based on code clone analysis

Abstract

Maintaining software systems is getting more complex and difficult task. Code clone is one of the factors that make software maintenance more difficult. A code clone is a code portion in source files that is identical or similar to another. If some faults are found in a code clone, it is necessary to correct the faults in its all code clones. We have developed a maintenance support environment, Gemini, which provides the user with the useful functions to analyze the code clones and modify them. However, through case studies, several problems were reported. That is, the clones provided by Gemini were not appropriate to merge into one module. In this paper, we intend to extend the functionality of Gemini to cope with the problems. Finally, we apply the extended Gemini to several software and evaluate the applicability of the new functions.