An Empirical Study of the Copy and Paste Behavior during Development

Developers frequently employ Copy and Paste. However, little is known about the copy and paste behavior during development. To better understand the copy and paste behavior, automated approaches are proposed to identify cloned code. However, such automated approaches can only identify the location of the code that has been copied and pasted, but little is known about the context of the copy and paste. On the other hand, prior research studying actual copy and paste behavior is based on a small number of users in an experimental setup. In this paper, we study the behavior of developers copying and pasting code while using the Eclipse IDE. We mine the usage data of over 20,000 Eclipse users. We aim to explore the different patterns of Copy and Paste (C&P) that are used by Eclipse users during development. We compare such usage patterns to the regular users´ usage of copy and paste during non-development tasks reported in earlier studies. Our findings instruct builders of future IDEs. We find that developers´ C&P behavior is considerably different from the behavior of regular users. For example, developers tend to perform more frequent C&P in the same file contrary to regular users, who tend to perform C&P across different windows. Moreover, we find that C&P across different programming languages is a common behavior as we extracted more than 75,000 C&P incidents across different programming languages. Such a finding highlights the need for code cloning tools that can detect code clones across different programming languages.