Code Duplications

In industrial environments where developers are under constant pressure of deadlines, it is a common practice to reuse source code by simply copying parts of it using the clipboard (it has been estimated that usually both industrial and open source systems contain roughly 20% of duplicated code). Although this approach can reduce software development time, the price in the long-term must be paid in the form of increased maintainability costs. One of the primary concerns is that if the original code segment needs to be corrected, all the copied parts need to be checked and changed accordingly as well. By inadvertently neglecting to change the related duplications, the programmers may leave bugs and introduce inconsistencies into the code.

The FrontEndART SourceAudit tools not just detect code duplications in the code base, they also compute related metrics (for detailed list download the descriptions from the right download bar). Furthermore, the meaning of code duplication can be customized by setting the minimal length of duplications. The duplicated code finder tool operates on structural level of the source code only, not caring about the lexical information. Consequently, it is absolutely immune to variable or other renamings.