A code inspection tool by mining recurring changes in evolving software

Mining software repositories have frequently been investigated in recent research. Software modification in repositories are often recurring changes, similar but different changes across multiple locations. It is not easy for developers to find all the relevant locations to maintain such changes, including bug-fixes, new feature addition, and refactorings. Performing recurring changes is tedious and error-prone, resulting in in-consistent and missing updates. To address this problem, we present CloneMap, a clone-aware code inspection tool that helps developers ensure correctness of recurring changes to multiple locations in an evolving software. CloneMap allows developers to specify the old and new versions of a program. It then applies a clone detection technique to (1) mine repositories for extracting differences of recurring changes, (2) visualize the clone evolution, and (3) help developers focus their attention to potential anomalies, such as inconsistent and missing updates.