A Novel Approach to Detect Unintentional Re-implementations

Unintentional re-implementation of existing functionality is an issue frequently reported in practice and causes increased efforts for development and maintenance. However, instances are hard to find with existing approaches. For practitioners, this increases maintenance risks, such as inconsistent bug fixing, and hinders quality improvement efforts. For researchers, this hinders a reliable quantification of the issue. We propose a pragmatic approach combining identifier-based concept location with static analysis to detect candidate re-implementations between two sets of source code. We present initial results from applying the approach to detect re-implementations of utility functionality present in libraries within a sample of Java projects.