Proactively managing clones inside an IDE: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Managing clones proactively is one of the hot research areas under Software Cloning domain. Researchers of the Clone Research Community argue that it is better to avoid clones rather than to refactor them. Integrated Clone Management Systems are the ways of implementing preventive (proactive) clone management approaches and are basically implemented as an add-on to the Integrated Development Environments. There are different techniques that are implemented as an add-on to IDEs, thus, literature has a corpus of plug-in tools that need to be organized and analyzed to have an efficient plug-in in the future. To identify the related literature, the well-known methodology proposed by Kitchenham [Guidelines for Performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering. Keele University and University of Durham, EBSE Technical Report; 2007.; Procedures for performing systematic reviews. School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Keele University, Keele, Technical Report; 2004] for conducting systematic literature review is adopted in this paper along with the snowballing technique. Utilizing these techniques, near about 33 IDE based real-time code clone detection tools are identified. This paper presents a comprehensive and systematic literature review of all the clone management techniques found in the literature that are integrated with the software development environments as a plug-in tool. An in-depth investigation and comparative analysis of all the plug-ins is carried out in this survey paper so that the future work can be identified for the further research under this domain.

Keywords:

• Plug-in tools
• proactive clone management
• real-time code clone detection
• systematic literature review

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank University Grants Commission (UGC) of Govt. of India, for financially supporting the ongoing research in the form of Research Fellowship to the first author, and also would like to acknowledge the Department of Computer Science, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar for providing the research facilities towards this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarveshwar Bharti

Mr. Sarveshwar Bharti is presently working at the Department of Computer Science, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India, as a Ph.D. Research Fellow. He has received his Master of Computer Applications (MCA) degree from University of Jammu, Jammu, India. He is a Software Engineering Researcher with research interests including Software Clones, Integrated Clone Management, and Clone Management Plug-in.

Hardeep Singh

Dr. Hardeep Singh is a Professor and Head at the Department of Computer Science, and Dean Students’ Welfare, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India. His research interests lie within Software Engineering and Information Systems. He has been awarded with various prestigious awards including Dewang Mehta Award for best Professor in Computer Engineering, ISTE Award for Best Teacher in Computer Science and Rotract International Award for best Teacher.