Method-level incremental code clone detection using hybrid approach

In the last decade, substantial research effort has been put into the detection and removal of clones from software systems; however, only few practical tools for this purpose are available for programming languages. Moreover, most methods for detecting clones are limited to a single revision of a program. This paper presents incremental clone detection with hybrid approach, which detects clones in multiple revisions of a program. This hybrid approach is a combination of textual analysis and metrics computation. Both clone detection and modification functionalities are integrated with CloneManager, a tool for C and Java programs. The incremental approach has been enhanced as an added feature to this CloneManager tool. We evaluate the enhanced CloneManager tool for six open source projects with the parameters precision and recall ratio.