Analyzing Software Bugs in Code Clones

Abstract: An extensive area of research in Software Engineering for the last two decades has been finding duplicate source code in the code base. The act of duplicating source code or copy-pasting source code in software systems is known as code cloning. Reusing source code or code cloning is a very common practice in software development. Code cloning can save time and cost. On the other hand, if a code fragment contains a bug then duplicating that source code will also duplicate the bug. Thus, in the literature there is a common belief that code cloning is responsible for spreading bugs in software systems. The primary goal of our study is to validate this common belief. To achieve this goal, we performed four major studies and analyzed the characteristics of bug-proneness of code clones. First, we aimed to understand bug-proneness in between clone and non-clone code. Afterwards, we explored bug-proneness of micro-clones which are smaller in size (from 1 LOC to 4 LOCs) in our second study. Later, we focused on bug-replication of regular code clones and micro-clones in our third and fourth studies. Our result supports the literature intuition and we found that code clones are more bug-prone than non-clone code. Moreover, we found that it is important to emphasize bug-prone code clones so that it will help us in clone management and better maintenance of software systems. We also proposed a possible solution to identify and manage these bug-prone code clones and showed some future paths of this research. 

Biography: Judith F. Islam is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Saskatchewan under supervision of Dr. Chanchal K. Roy. Her research involves the analysis of code clones throughout the evolution of software systems. She is interested especially in software bugs residing in clone code. Her thesis comprehends through empirical studies on comparing bug-proneness and bug-replication between clone code, non-clone code, regular clone, and micro-clone. Her research has been published in reputed peer-reviewed journal and conferences on software engineering.

Tuesday November 17, 2020 at 2:00 PM via Zoom

Link: https://zoom.us/j/8644735948?pwd=ZzVyeTZzNlhhZUVnM21mekxCK1ZlZz09