Assessing the Benefits of Incorporating Function Clone Detection in a Development Process

The objective of the experiment presented in this paper is to bring insights in the evaluation of the potential benefits of introducing a function clone detection technology in an industrial software development process. To take advantage of function clone detection, two modifications to the software development process are presented. Our experiment consists in evaluating the impact that these proposed changes would have had on a specific software system if they had been applied over a 3 year period (involving 10 000 person-months), where 6 subsequent versions of the software under study were released. The system under study is a large telecommunication software. In total, 89 millions lines of code have been analyzed. A first result showed that, against our expectations, a significant number of clones is being removed from the system over time. However, this effort is insufficient to prevent the growth of the overall number of clones in the system. In this context the first process change would have add value. We have also found that the second process change would have provided programmers with a significant number of opportunities for correcting problems before customers experienced them. This result shows a potential for improving the software system quality and customer satisfaction.