A Novel Framework to Identify Non-Contiguous Clones

Software refactoring is the process of changing the code without changing its behavior and is done to reduce the maintenance effort of the system. Maintenance is a difficult activity which involves adapting the new environment and the difficulty level is increased due to the poor structure of the program. In this paper a new framework is proposed in which the task of removing the clones is done by the developer irrespective of the language in which the project is being made. It also identifies the unique clones which should be removed without changing the behavior of the program thereby the effort at the maintenance side is reduced to a very large extent. This framework has been developed keeping non-contiguous clones in consideration since these types of clones are difficult to extract specially in cases where the flow of program switches from one module to another module.