Code clone detection using coarse and fine-grained hybrid approaches

Abstract

If two fragments of source code are identical to each other, they are called code clones. Code clones introduce difficulties in software maintenance and cause bug propagation. Coarse-grained clone detectors have higher precision than fine-grained, but fine-grained detectors have higher recall than coarse-grained. In this paper, we present a hybrid clone detection technique that first uses a coarse-grained technique to analyze clones effectively to improve precision. Subsequently, we use a fine-grained detector to obtain additional information about the clones and to improve recall. Our method detects Type-1 and Type-2 clones using hash values for blocks, and gapped code clones (Type-3) using block detection and subsequent comparison between them using Levenshtein distance and Cosine measures with varying thresholds.