Extracting the similarity in detected software clones using metrics

Abstract

Copying a code fragment and reusing it by pasting with or without minor modifications is a common practice in software development environments. Various techniques have been proposed to find duplicated redundant code. Previous work was simple and practical methods for detecting exact and near miss clones over arbitrary program fragments in program source code by using abstract syntax trees. Our proposal is a new technique for finding similar code blocks and for quantifying their similarity. Our techniques can be used to find clone clusters, sets of code blocks all within a user-supplied similarity. It detects similar clones using metrics for type 1, type 2 of clones.