Evolution of Near-Miss Clones

Abstract

It is often claimed that duplicated source code fragments increase the maintenance effort in software systems. To investigate the impact of so called clones it is useful to analyze how they evolve. A previous study analyzed several aspects of the evolution of identical clones in nine open source systems and has found that the peculiarity of clone evolution is significantly different for each system, which makes a general conclusion difficult. In this paper we investigate in which ways the evolution of near-miss clones differs from the evolution of identical clones. By analyzing seven open source systems we draw comparisons between identical and near-miss clones. Based on the findings we conclude that near-miss clones require more attention regarding clone management techniques compared to identical clones.