Detecting Clones in Business Applications

A business application automates a collection of business processes. A business process describes how a set of logically related tasks are executed, ordered and managed by following business rules to achieve business objectives. An online bookstore business application contains several tasks such as buying a book, ordering a book, and sending out promotions. Business analysts specify business tasks and software developers implement these tasks. Throughout the lifetime of a business application, business analysts may clone (e.g., copy and slightly modify) business processes to handle special circumstances or promotions. Identifying these clones and removing them helps improve the efficiency of an organization. However most clone detection techniques are source code based not business process based. In this paper, we propose an approach that makes use of traditional source code detection techniques to detect clones in business applications. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through a case study on 10 large open source business applications in the Apache Open for Business Project.