Selecting a set of appropriate metrics for detecting code clones

Abstract

Most of the software systems consist of a number of code clones. Although it makes the task of software development easy but at the same time code cloning may cause several maintenance and cost related problems. A number of clone detection techniques have been proposed so far. In this paper, an approach for selecting a set of appropriate metrics from a list of large number of metrics is presented. The proposed approach evaluates a set of independent metrics on the basis of their precision and recall values in clone detection starting from all combinations of one metric and then gradually increasing the number of metrics in the metrics combinations until the complete set of metrics involved in the approach are evaluated. The result of implementing the proposed approach on a C language software system is provided as example.