Aiding Software Maintenance with Copy-and-Paste Clone-Awareness

When programmers copy, paste, and then modify source code, the once-identical code fragments (code clones) can become indistinguishable as the software evolves over time. In this paper, we present three features of our software tool, a set of Eclipse plug-ins named CnP (CnP´s clone visualization, CReN, and LexId), which aids the programmer during copy-and-paste programming. We believe that the clone-awareness that the tool provides can help programmers benefit from this clone information during debugging and modification tasks, develop software more efficiently, and prevent inconsistent identifier renaming within clones. We tested these hypotheses with a user study and present our results.