Authors:
Lerina Aversano
1
;
Mario Bernardi
1
;
Marta Cimitile
2
;
Martina Iammarino
1
and
Debora Montano
3
Affiliations:
1
University of Sannio, Department of Engineering, Benevento, Italy
;
2
Unitelma Sapienza University, Rome, Italy
;
3
Universitas Mercatorum, Rome, Italy
Keyword(s):
Software Maintainability, Software Quality Metrics, Clones Detection, Decompiled Source-Code.
Abstract:
Copying and pasting code snippets, with or without intent, is a very common activity in software development. These have both positive and negative aspects because they save time, but cause an increase in costs for software maintenance. However, often the copied code changes due to bug fixes or refactorings, which could affect clone detection. In this regard, this study aims to investigate whether the transformations performed by the compiler on the code can determine the appearance of a set of previously undetectable clones. The proposed approach involves the extraction of software quality metrics on both decompiled and source code to bring to light any differences due to the presence of undetectable clones on the source code. Experiments were conducted on five open-source Java software systems. The results show that indeed compiler optimizations lead to the appearance of a set of previously undetected clones, which can be called logical clones. This phenomenon in Java appears to be
marginal as it amounts to 5% more clones than normal, therefore a statistically negligible result in small projects, but in the future, it would be interesting to extend the study to other programming languages to evaluate any different cases.
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