Comparison and Evaluation of Clone Detection Tools

TLDR

Software clone detection has many proposed techniques, but their comparative recall, precision, and resource usage remain unclear. The study evaluates six clone detectors on eight large C and Java programs totaling approximately 850 KLOC. The evaluation employed an independent reviewer and covered state‑of‑the‑art methods that analyze text, lexical, syntactic, metric, and dependency‑graph information.

Abstract

Many techniques for detecting duplicated source code (software clones) have been proposed in the past. However, it is not yet clear how these techniques compare in terms of recall and precision as well as space and time requirements. This paper presents an experiment that evaluates six clone detectors based on eight large C and Java programs (altogether almost 850 KLOC). Their clone candidates were evaluated by one of the authors as independent third party. The selected techniques cover the whole spectrum of the state-of-the-art in clone detection. The techniques work on text, lexical and syntactic information, software metrics, and program dependency graphs.