Code Clone Authorship - A First Look

Code clones are said to threaten the maintainability of software systems. Changes to one cloned code sequence likely require propagation to its copies. Proper change propagation may be more difficult when the clones are created and maintained by different authors. We present an approach to track the authors of code clones and report on a first case study. The results indicate that the number of contributing authors has an effect on the probability that clones are changed and the probability that these changes are carried out consistently.