Searching for Configurations in Clone Evaluation - A Replication Study

Clone detection is the process of finding duplicated code within a software code base in an automated manner. It is useful in several areas of software development such as code quality analysis, bug detection, and program understanding. We replicate a study of a geneticalgorithm based framework that optimises parameters for clone agreement (EvaClone). We apply the framework to 14 releases of Mockito, a Java mocking framework. We observe that the optimised parameters outperform the tools’ default parameters in term of clone agreement by 19.91% to 66.43%. However, the framework gives undesirable results in term of clone quality. EvaClone either maximises or minimises a number of clones in order to achieve the highest agreement resulting in more false positives or false negatives introduced consequently.