CloneMap: A Clone-Aware Code Inspection Tool in Evolving Software

Mining software repositories is a frequent tactic in the evaluation of software in our research. Software modification of large code bases often consists of recurring changes, similar but slightly different changes across multiple locations and revisions. It is a high-effort, time consuming process for developers to find all the relevant locations to maintain such changes among bug-fixes, refactorings, and new code being added to the code base for new features. This process is highly error-prone leading to many mistakes, such as inconsistent or incorrect updates. To address this problem, we present a tool that helps developers ensure correctness of recurring changes to multiple locations in an evolving software. CloneMap is a clone-aware code inspection tool which allows developers to specify the older and newer revisions of a software. 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 as the software evolves from one revision to the next.