Assessing cross-project clones for reuse optimization

Organizational structures (e. g., separate accounting, heterogeneous infrastructure, or different development processes) can restrict systematic reuse among projects within companies. As a consequence, code is often copied between projects which increases maintenance costs and can cause failures due to inconsistent bug fixing. Assessing cross-project clones helps to uncover organizational obstacles for code reuse and to leverage other ways of systematic reuse. Furthermore, knowing how strongly clones are entangled with the surrounding code helps to decide if and how to extract them to commonly used libraries. We propose to combine cross-project clone detection and dependency analyses to detect (1) what is cloned between projects, (2) how far the cloned code is entangled with the surrounding system and (3) what are candidates for extraction into common libraries.