Method-level Code Clone Detection for Java
through Hybrid Approach
Egambaram
Kodhai1 and Selvadurai Kanmani2
1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sri MankulaVinayagar Engineering
College, India
2Department of Information Technology, Pondicherry Engineering
College, India
Abstract: A software clone is an active
research area where several researchers have investigated techniques to
automatically detect duplicated code in programs. However their researches have
limitations either in finding the structural or functional clones. Moreover, all
these techniques detected only the first three types of clones. In this paper,
we propose a hybrid approach combining metric-based approach with textual
analysis of the source code for the detection of both syntactical and
functional clones in a given Java source code. This proposal is also used to
detect all four types of clones. The detection process makes use of a set of
metrics calculated for each type of clones. A tool named CloneManager is developed
based on this method in Java for high portability and platform-independency.
The various types of clones detected by the tool are classified and clustered
as clone clusters. The tool is also tested with seven existing open source
projects developed in Java and compared with the existing approaches.
Keywords: Clone detection, functional clones, source code metrics, string-matching.
Received October 21, 2013; accepted June 24,
2014