Tracking Code Clone for Software Traceability and Quality

As one of the major problems in software maintenance, code clone, a pair of duplicated code in a source code, is well known. For software improvement, it is valuable to track code clone which has potential risk. This is because to determine how to treat code clones needs deep insight for the code clones. However, such code clone tracking is hard task especially for fresh developer. To support tracking code clones, we have proposed code clone history detection method. Code clone history reflects various manipulations to code clones including introduction, deletion, or just leaving unchanged. It also contains information about creator or modifier of code clones, and time of each manipulation. This means that tracking code clone history reveals many results of developer’s decisions about code clones. Thus, we assume various clues to improve software quality can be retrieved from tracking information of code clones.