For supporting in-depth clone analysis, VisCad can compute a set of metrics. We can divide the metrics into two broard categories. The first set of metrics (clone system metric set) relate clones with the organizational structure of the subject system and can be computed for different system boundaries, such as for the entire system, for subsystems/directories or for source files, as per the user’s choice. Depending on the granularity of operation, we can again subdivide them into two groups, the file metric set and the directory metric set. The next set of metrics (clone class metrics set) deals with the clone classes.
VisCad supports four operations for each metric set. These are:
1. Exporting : Results of metric computations can be exported in CSV (comma separated values)format.
2. Plotting : Although metrics are important for quantitative analysis, identifying important patterns from a large set of data is difficult. To avoid such difficulties, users can plot the metrics values with a bar chart which helps in identifying an anomaly within clone patterns easily.
3. Browsing Clone Code: Depending on the metrics values, user may be interested to explore the clone fragments located within a file or directory. VisCad also supports such operation.
4. Sorting : Values can be sorted to locate the maximum or the minimum value easily.