A Measurement of Similarity to Identify Identical Code Clones

Mythili ShanmughaSundaram and Sarala Subramani

Department of Information Technology, Bharathiar University, India

Abstract: Code clones are described as a part of the program which is completely or partially similar to the other portions. In the earlier research the code clones have been detected using fingerprinting technique. The major challenge in our work was to group the code clones based on similarity measure. The proposed system measures the similarity based on similarity distance. The defined expression considers two parameters for calculating the similarity measure namely the similarity distance and the population of the clone. Thereby the code clones are clustered and ranked on the basis of their similarity measures. Indexing is used to interactively identify the clones which are caused due to inconsistent changes. As a result of this work all the identical clusters for most similar and more similar categories are identified.

Keywords: Clone detection, software clones, fingerprinting, clustering, reuse.