A Framework for Software Clone Management

Software development is frequently accompanied by activities such as adapting existing software, with or without change, and developing applications from the ground up. Copy-paste actions that reuse software result in clones, which are replicated code fragments. Because code clones impair the maintainability of the system being built, a variety of code clone detecting approaches and tools have been developed. This paper proposes a method for generating a prioritised list of code clones based on their detection. The code clones are graded according to their severity or criticality.