SPAPE: A semantic-preserving amorphous procedure extraction method for near-miss clones

•We developed SPAPE, a near-miss clone extraction method.•We applied SPAPE on ten large scale open source software products.•We conclude that SPAPE is effective, it performs well, and it will be a useful tool.

Cloned code, also known as duplicated code, is among the bad “code smells”. Procedure extraction can be used to remove clones and to make a software system more maintainable. While the existing procedure extraction techniques can handle automatic extraction of exact clones effectively, they fail to do so for near-miss clones, which are the code fragments that are similar but not the same. To address this gap, we developed SPAPE, a novel semantic-preserving amorphous procedure extraction method to extract near-miss clones. SPAPE relaxes the constraint of having the same syntax and uses the structural semantic information. We evaluated the performance, effectiveness, and benefits of SPAPE. Our results show that SPAPE can extract more near-miss clones than the best applicable method for ten open-source-software products in an efficient and effective fashion. We conclude that SPAPE can be a useful contribution to the toolsets of software managers and developers, and it can help them improve code structure and reduce software maintenance and overall project costs.