Clone Evolution and Management.

Programmers tend to write code clones unintentionally, which can be easily avoided. Clone change management is a crucial issue in open-source software (OSS) and industrial software development (e.g., development of social infrastructure, financial systems, and medical equipment). When industrial software developers have to fix a defect, they must find the code clones corresponding to the code fragment, including it. To date, several studies have been conducted on the analysis of clone evolution using OSS. However, only a few studies have reported on the application of a clone change notification system to the industrial software development process of our knowledge. In this chapter, first, we introduce a system that notifies about the creation of code clones. Then, we report on our experience with the system after a 40-day long application of it in a corporation’s software development process. In the industrial application, a developer successfully identified ten unintentionally created clones that should be merged. Moreover, we introduce the improvements that were made since we released the initial version of the notification system. Besides, we demonstrate a usage scenario of the current version. The current version of Clone Notifier and its video are available at: https://github.com/s-tokui/CloneNotifier.