Towards Visualizing Large Scale Evolving Clones

Software systems in this big data era are growing larger and becoming more intricate. Tracking and managing code clones in such evolving software systems are challenging tasks. To understand how clone fragments are evolving, the programmers often analyze the co-evolution of clone fragments manually to decide about refactoring, tracking, and bug removal. Such manual analysis is infeasible for a large number of clones with clones evolving over hundreds of software revisions. We propose a visual analytics framework, that leverages big data visualization techniques to manage code clones in large software systems. Our framework combines multiple information-linked zoomable views, where users can explore and analyze clones through interactive exploration in real time. We discuss several scenarios where our framework may assist developers in real-life software development and clone maintenance. Experts' reviews reveal many future potentials of our framework.