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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Software
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2025.1520344
This article is part of the Research Topic Advances in Software Quality Engineering for Complex Systems View all articles
A visual clone analysis method
Provisionally accepted- Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR), Cártago, Costa Rica
The process of creating high-quality software is always a top challenge for developers. Besides acquiring and honing the trained skills and knowledge needed to fulfill this process successfully, they face the persistent need for better methods and tools to understand and analyze software systems. This research proposes a method for building metrics-based visual analytic tools fully integrated into the development environment to enhance the capabilities and convenience of these working environments. In particular, duplicate code metrics allow developers to locate and correct potential threats to software quality, understandability, maintainability, and scalability; refactoring duplicate code should help to avoid duplication of effort during maintenance and to decrease the possibility of introducing errors and inconsistencies. The proposed approach is demonstrated by programming a plugin component that detects and allows the visual analysis of duplicate code in a working project. We developed this tool for a well-known integrated development environment.
Keywords: software engineering, Code clones, visual analysis, code metrics, Understandability
Received: 31 Oct 2024; Accepted: 03 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Navas-Su, Gonzalez-Torres and Hernandez-Castro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jose Navas-Su, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR), Cártago, Costa Rica
Antonio Gonzalez-Torres, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR), Cártago, Costa Rica
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