[Engineering Paper] Identifying Feature Clones in a Suite of Systems

Abstract

As part of a module re-unification project of an industrial partner's code, spanning one systems and two derivative systems, the feature-clone variants across these systems have to be extracted, to be later re-unified as singular code elements for re-use. To assist developers with this task, the CoRA (The Code Re-unification Application) tool was designed and implemented. An approach, and the subsequent design of the tool was derived from reflection on manual feature-location/clonedetection efforts on the company's systems, in the first phase of an action research cycle where the approach/implementation will be iteratively trialled, and subsequently refined, in-situ. A pilot study is discussed that leads to the proposed tool. The tool combines a hybrid (textual-static) feature location technique and a textual clone detection technique for featureclone identification. In this paper, the rationale behind the CoRA tool is presented, followed by a tool overview and its implementation details. Finally, an example use case shows how the tool is used to locate clones of a particular feature.