Language-agnostic Incremental Code Clone Detection

Code duplication is a form of technical debt frequently observed in software systems. Its existence negatively affects the maintainability of a system in numerous ways. In order to tackle the issues that come with it, various automated clone detection techniques have been proposed throughout the years. However, the vast majority of them operate...

The last line effect explained

Micro-clones are tiny duplicated pieces of code; they typically comprise only few statements or lines. In this paper, we study the “Last Line Effect,” the phenomenon that the last line or statement in a micro-clone is much more likely to contain an error than the previous lines or statements. We do this by analyzing 219 open source projects and...

Copy-Paste Detection in Spreadsheets

When a company is in need of a reporting tool, the most commonly made decision is to choose for Excel. In fact, over 90% of the world’s companies base their decisions on a report made using Excel. This shows that the number of spreadsheet designers, of end-user programmers, is large. It has been estimated to be 5 times as large as the number of...