An Empirical Study on Similar Changes in Evolving Software

Oftentimes, refactoring can eliminate problems of code clones, however, that is not always the case as refactoring does not always work due to the limitation of the Java Programming language. There have been numerous studies which focus on the evolution of code clones including their impacts on software systems, their lifetimes, and their transformations. Yet, some of code clone's properties still remain a mystery. In this study, we focus on how clone groups evolve from one version to the next by manually inspecting the similar changes from clone groups in the older version and comparing it with clone groups in the newer version. We will also be looking for any special relationship between the similar changes clone groups and projects growth.