Survey Based Analysis of Effect of Code Clones on Software Quality

Code clones are similar code portions. Cloning is a process of duplicating code segments by copy-paste activities that is a common activity in software development. It is believed that the presence of code clone is one of the factors that have a great impact on software quality attributes. In literature many techniques have been proposed to detect and eliminate code clones on this basis. Various research efforts are being performed to reduce somber problems caused by code clones. This paper presents the study of the effect of code clones on software quality. In this paper an industrial study is presented to understand impact of code clones on a software system from software developer's point of view. This study involves a questionnaire survey and collects enough data about the reasons behind the cloning activity and the impact of code clones on a software system. The results of the study show that clones have a harmful effect on the system. This study also suggests that maintenance is the mostly effected software quality attribute. Keywords—Code Clones, Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), Program Dependence Graph (PDG).