Managing Code Clones

CloneBoard

CloneBoard is an Eclipse plug-in for code clone management. It supports dynamic code clone indentification by investigating copy/paste behavior of the developers. When copy/paste commands are used within Eclipse, CloneBoard queries the user as to the purpose of the copy/paste operation and depending on the answer, it builds up clone relations. CloneBoard also warns when a clone from a code clone relation is changed and queries the user whether the user wants to edit just this one clone or the whole clone relation.

Papers on CloneBoard

• Michiel de Wit's MSc thesis
• Michiel de Wit, Andy Zaidman, Arie van Deursen, Managing code clones using dynamic change tracking and resolution. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), pages 169-178, IEEE Computer Society, 2009. (PDF)

CloneBoard tool

A binary distribution of CloneBoardis available for download: Cloneboard 0.1.1.3.

You can install it by extracting the contents of the zip file right into your Eclipse plug-in directory. Restart Eclipse and CloneBoard is installed. We have tried out CloneBoard on Eclipse Ganymede (3.4.x) and Galileo (3.5.x).

Development of CloneBoard

CloneBoard has been developed by Michiel de Wit as part of his MSc thesis at Delft University of Technology. At this time, no further development of CloneBoard is taking place. The sources of CloneBoard are available upon request (contact Andy Zaidman).

Screencast of CloneBoard

This screencast illustrates a some of the basic functionality of CloneBoard.

-- AndyZaidman - 06 Apr 2009