Method-Level Code Clone Modification using Refactoring Techniques for Clone Maintenance

Abstract

Researchers focused on activities such as clone maintenance to assist the programmers. Refactoring is a well-known process to improve the maintainability of the software. Program refactoring is a technique to improve readability, structure, performance, abstraction, maintainability, or other characteristics by transforming a program. This paper contributes to a more unified approach for the phases of clone maintenance with a focus on clone modification. This approach uses the refactoring technique for clone modification. To detect the clones 'CloneManager' tool has been used. This approach is implemented as an enhancement to the existing tool CloneManager. The enhanced tool is tested with the open source projects and the results are compared with the performance of other three existing tools.