CloneAyz: An Approach for Clone Representation and Analysis

Code clones have both negative and positive impacts on softwares. Researchers have proposed lots of detection tools to find clones from softwares. However, the information in detection results is not enough to help developers understand and maintain clones. Therefore, we design and implement a clone analysis tool, named CloneAyz, to aid developers to analyze and understand clones. CloneAyz can parse detection results of different tools automatically, and represent code clones in a unified form, which contains information about clone evolution and some clone metrics we extracted in order to improve clone analysis efficiency. We evaluate our tool on three open-source Java projects, and the results show that CloneAyz can help developers analyze and understand clones effectively. CloneAyz can also give some contributions for developers on clone maintenance, such as clone refactoring.