A criterion for filtering code clone related bugs

Abstract

Software reviews are time-consuming task especially for large software systems. To reduce the efforts required, Li et al. developed CP-Miner, a code clone detection tool that detects identifier naming inconsistencies between code clones as bug candidates. However, reviewers using CP-Miner still have to assess many inconsistencies, since the tool also reports many false-positive candidates. To reduce the false-positive candidates, we propose a criterion for filtering the candidates. In our experiments, filtering with the proposed criterion removed 30% of the false-positive candidates and no true-positive candidates. This result shows that the proposed criterion helps the review task by effectively reducing the number of bug candidates.