A Survey of Approaches for Code Clone Search

Abstract

To improve the quality and productivity of software, developers frequently perform code searches. To support this task, many previous research studies have proposed code clone search approaches that search a set of code clones (similar code fragments) of an input code fragment. In this survey paper, we investigate code clone detection techniques and evaluation metrics used in the previous studies. In detail, at first, we categorize code clone detection techniques and then introduce code search approaches in each category. Then, we further elaborate evaluation metrics used in previous studies. Finally, we discuss possible future research directions on code clone search.