Refactoring Support Environment Based on Code Clone Analysis

Recently, code clone has been regarded as one of factors that make software maintenance more difficult. A code clone is a code fragment in a source code that is identical or similar to another. For example, if we modify a code fragment which has code clones, it is necessary to consider whether we have to modify each of its code clones. It is generally said that code clone is one of bad-smells to be refactored. There are two ways of maintenance support for code clones. One is to comprehend and manage code clones, and the other is to remove them. For the former support, we have developed code clone analysis environment Gemini. For the latter support, several methods have been proposed. But, it is difficult to apply them to large software because of various reasons such as high time complexity. In this paper, we propose a method that detects refactoring-oriented code clone in practical use time. And, we develop a characterization of code clones by some metrics, which suggests how to remove them. Then, we develop refactoring support environment Aries. We expect Aries can support software maintenance more effectively.