Software Clone Management Towards Industrial Application (Dagstuhl Seminar 12071)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12071 ``Software Clone Management Towards Industrial Application''. Software clones are identical or similar pieces of code or design. A lot of research has been devoted to software clones. Unlike previous research, this seminar put a particular emphasis on industrial application of software clone management methods and tools and aimed at gathering concrete usage scenarios of clone management in industry, which will help to identify new industrially relevant aspects in order to shape the future research.

Talks were presented by industrial participants and working groups were formed to discuss issues in clone detection, presentation, and refactoring. In addition we developed a unified conceptual model to capture clone information required to support a common notion of clone data and for interoperability to foster exchange of data among researchers and tools in practice. The main focus of current research is clones in source code -- therefore, we also looked into ways of extending our research to other types of software artifacts. Last but not least, we discussed how clone management activities may be integrated into the process of software development.