Semantic Code Clone Detection Method for Distributed Enterprise Systems

Conventional approaches to code clone detection consider systems from elementary construct perspectives, making it difficult to detect semantic clones. This paper argues that semantic clone detection could be improved for enterprise systems since they typically use well-established architectures and standards. Semantic clone detection is crucial for enterprises where software's codebase grows and evolves and maintenance costs rise significantly. While researchers have proposed many code clone detection techniques, there is a lack of solutions targeted explicitly toward enterprise systems and even fewer solutions dedicated to semantic clones. Semantic clones exhibit the same behavior between clone pairs but differ in the syntactic structure. This paper proposes a novel approach to detect semantic clones for enterprise frameworks. The driving idea is to transform a particular enterprise application into a control-flow graph representation. Next, various proprietary similarity functions are applied to compare targeted enterprise metadata for each pair of the control-flow graph fragment. As a result, we achieve to detect semantic clones with high accuracy and reasonable time complexity.