A framework for studying and predicting bug propagation through code cloning for mobile apps

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Code cloning (i.e., copy/pasting) is a common yet controversial software engineering practice, which is often practised by the programmers during development and maintenance for repeating common functionalities. Such a practice results the existence of identical or nearly similar code fragments, also known as code clones, in a code-base. Two code fragments that are similar to each other form a clone-pair. While a number of studies have identified some positive impacts of code clones, other studies have shown strong empirical evidence of negative impacts too. Code clones can be directly related to bugs and inconsistencies in the code-base. If a particular code fragment in a code-base contains a temporarily hidden bug, and a programmer copies that fragment to several other places being unaware of the presence of the bug, the bug in the original fragment gets propagated. Given that software bugs are of primary concerns of any software, one must need to have tools and frameworks to deal with software bugs. However, there is no study on how frequently bug-propagation occurs during code cloning. Without studying the intensity of bug-propagation we cannot properly realize the impacts of code clones on software evolution and maintenance. Furthermore, there are no studies that investigated the propagated bugs for code clones for mobile applications. Given that Push Interactions mainly develop mobile applications, it is important for Push to make sure that their software applications do not have many of these propagated bugs. However, until now they do not have any such frameworks that can study the bug propagation through code cloning (propagation of bugs through copy/pasting of existing buggy code fragments). Furthermore, it is important to have a prediction model so that the model could predict which clone fragments might experience such propagated bugs in future during the evolution. With such toolset, Push Interactions would be able to have a clear idea about the presence of code clones in their mobile applications, their relationships to bugs, will find which clones are likely involve with bugs, and can predict the buggy clones. These will ensure proper maintenance and evolution of their mobile software applications.