On the characteristics of buggy code clones: A code quality perspective

Code clone is an immensely studied code smell. Not all the clones in a software system are equally harmful. Earlier work studied various traits of clones including their stability and relationships with program faults against non-cloned code. This paper presents a comparative study on the characteristics of buggy and non-buggy clones from a code quality perspective. In the light of 29 code quality metrics, we study buggy and non-buggy clones in 2,077 revisions of three software systems written in Java. The findings from this work add to the characterization of buggy clones. Such a characterization will be useful in cost-effective clone management and clone-aware software development.