Efficiency and Precision Enhancement of Code Clone Detection Using Hybrid Technique-Based Web Tool

Abstract

With the advent and growth in the field of software reuse, the maintenance of code and respective repositories is becoming a great challenge. Code cloning is one of the major causes behind this. Code clone is a code portion which is identical or similar to other potions of code. Copy and paste of a code fragment is also considered as a form of code cloning which makes maintenance of software more complicated. Software maintenance (SM) is defined as the modification done to the existing software after development and implementation. Using SM process, the software companies provide add-ons and updates as per working environment and need to remove bugs and to correct any fault identified during it execution to improve the performance. This research work presents a large-scale study of existing tools which has been carried out for detection of code clones. These suggested tools employ different methodology for code clone detection. The work focus on pragmatic and detailed study on the detection of code clones. The research work further explores the various challenges in code clone detection in terms of bug propagation, irregularities in change propagation, design mistakes, increased challenge in refactoring, and increased code comprehension efforts. The study carried out suggests that more efficient algorithm and techniques are required to detect code cloning. The study also shows that a web-based tool to detect clones in code would be more beneficial. The authors propose a hybrid methodology for web-based code clone detection tool (WCCD) which can be used to detect code clones in any browser. The proposed tool implements a more powerful clone detector to identify clones in code in an efficient and precise manner. Repetition of code clones that seems to be vulnerable could be a malware whose detection using the existing tool is an issue. Hence, the proposed work has been further extended to detect malware to make the process of code clone detection more effective and efficient.