What do we need to know about clones? deriving information needs from user goals

Abstract

Clone detection can be used to achieve diverse objectives such as refactoring, program understanding, bug localization, and plagiarism detection, etc. Each goal takes a different perspective on clone information needs. Different clone detection tools report different information about clones. To gauge the suitability of a given clone detector for a particular user objective, we need to determine which information needs implied by the objective a clone detector addresses. In this paper, we make a first step toward gathering clone information needs from the description of user goals. The results of our analysis are useful for various stakeholders such as programmers, managers, tool developers, and researchers.