An Industrial Study on Developers' Prevalent Copy and Paste Activities

Abstract

Copy and then pasting code fragments is the most prevalent activity accomplished by the developers to reuse the available functionality. It has been empirically evidenced that this programming approach is one of the main reasons for code cloning in the software systems and thus needs to be managed. The literature mentions many tools that have been implemented to proactively manage clones while tracking this copy and paste activity inside IDEs. To have a better management tool, developer's behavior should be analyzed. To gather the knowledge about the programming practices, this paper presents results from an industrial survey conducted, involving professional developers, to understand the developer's copy and paste intentions. This work will shed a light on what programmers are doing while reusing code and why. This study reveals various reasons/intentions, extent, source etc. of the copy and paste activity done by the developer. This study reported the frequent use of this typical activity by the programmers so as not to reinvent the wheel and the negative impacts of this programming activity. And, finally, results suggest incorporating the functionality, inspired by the inference drawn from developers' behavior to the existing IDEs to manage the activities committed by the developer.