Method-level Code Clone Detection for Java through Hybrid Approach

A software clone is an active research area where several researchers have investigated techniques to automatically detect duplicated code in programs. However their researches have limitations either in finding the structural or functional clones. Moreover, all these techniques detected only the first three types of clones. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach combining metric-based approach with textual analysis of the source code for the detection of both syntactical and functional clones in a given Java source code. This proposal is also used to detect all four types of clones. The detection process makes use of a set of metrics calculated for each type of clones. A tool named CloneManager is developed based on this method in Java for high portability and platform-independency. The various types of clones detected by the tool are classified and clustered as clone clusters. The tool is also tested with seven existing open source projects developed in Java and compared with the existing approaches.