Detection of Non Continguous Clones in Software using Program Slicing

Code duplication or copying a code fragment and then reuse by pasting with or without any modifcations is a well known code smell in software maintenance. Several studies show that about 5% to 20% of a software systems can contain duplicated code,which is basically the results of copying existing code fragments and using then by pasting with or without minor modifcations. Software cloning is copying of code fragment from one source code and using it in another source code. Cloning of software code has bad impact. One of the major problem of such duplicated fragments is that if a bug is find out in a code fragment, all the other fragments similar to it should need to check. For code clone detection, many detection techniques are there with different code intermediate representation techniques. This paper proposes a clone detection technique using program slicing with matching technique. The aim of the proposed approach is detection of three types of clone i.e. type 1 (exact match), type 2 (parameterized match) type 3 (near-miss match). The technique also detects non-contiguous clones.