Non-Trivial Software Clone Detection Using Program Dependency Graph

Abstract

Code clones are copied fragments that occur at different levels of abstraction and may have different origins in a software system. This article presents an approach which shows the significant parts of source code. Further, by using significant parts of a source code, a control flow graph can be generated. This control flow graph represents the statements of a code/program in the form of basic blocks or nodes and the edges represent the control flow between those basic blocks. A hybrid approach, named the Program Dependence Graph (PDG) is also presented in this article for the detection of non-trivial code clones. The program dependency graph approach consists of two approaches as a control dependency graph and a data dependency graph. The control dependency graph is generated by using a control flow graph. This article proposes an approach which can easily generate control flow graphs and by using control flow graph and reduced flowgraph approach, the trivial software clone, a similar textual structure, can be detected.The proposed approach is based on a tokenization concept.