Determining the provenance of software artifacts

Abstract

Software clone detection has made substantial progress in the last 15 years, and software clone analysis is starting to provide real insight into how and why code clones are born, evolve, and sometimes die. In this position paper, we make the case that there is a more general problem lurking in the background: software artifact provenance analysis. We argue that determining the origin of software artifacts is an increasingly important problem with many dimensions. We call for simple and lightweight techniques that can be used to help narrow the search space, so that more expensive techniques - including manual examination can be used effectively on a smaller candidate set. We predict the problem of software provenance will lead towards new avenues of research for the software clones community.