Survey of Research on Software Clones

Abstract

This report summarizes my overview talk on software clone detection
research. It first discusses the notion of software redundancy, cloning, duplication,
and similarity. Then, it describes various categorizations of clone types, empirical
studies on the root causes for cloning, current opinions and wisdom of consequences
of cloning, empirical studies on the evolution of clones, ways to remove, to avoid,
and to detect them, empirical evaluations of existing automatic clone detector performance
(such as recall, precision, time and space consumption) and their fitness
for a particular purpose, benchmarks for clone detector evaluations, presentation
issues, and last but not least application of clone detection in other related fields.
After each summary of a subarea, I am listing open research questions.