Design and Development of Software Tool for Code Clone Search, Detection, and Analysis

Replicating a piece of code with or without making minor changes in their code during project development is a normal practice adopted by the developers to reduce their production time which results in code/program clones. Clones could also occur in their existing file without any prior knowledge of the programmer. Though code/program cloning helps to increase the productivity initially, later it may increase the maintenance cost. Hence code/program cloning needs to be identified thoroughly during the development in a frequent interval of time. The main objective of this work involves in depth analysis of source code produced by the programmer for code cloning and to indicate how much percentage of code is copied in that their file. The proposed work detects clones in terms of syntax, function, method, variables, data types, keywords, spaces, author name, imports, commented lines, number of lines, and last-modified-date and shows the similarity percentage in graphically.