Static Bug Detection Through Analysis of Inconsistent Clones

Existing software systems contain a significant amount of duplicated code. Such redundancy can negatively impact program correctness, since inconsistent updates to duplicated code fragments are prone to introduce subtle bugs. This paper outlines our work-in-progress to statically detect inconsistencies in duplicated code fragments in order to find clone-related bugs. We illustrate the problem of clone related bugs with the example of such a bug in Eclipse, outline our algorithm for detecting inconsistencies in clones and report initial experiences from an industrial case study conducted with the Munich Re Group.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SE
• Authors: Elmar Jürgens, Benjamin Hummel, Florian Deissenboeck, Martin Feilkas
• Keywords: Clone Related Bugs, Duplicated Code, Duplicated Code Fragments, SE 2008, Software Engineering