Detecting similar Java classes using tree algorithms

Similarity analysis of source code is helpful during development to provide, for instance, better support for code reuse. Consider a development environment that analyzes code while typing and that suggests similar code examples or existing implementations from a source code repository. Mining software repositories by means of similarity measures enables and enforces reusing existing code and reduces the developing effort needed by creating a shared knowledge base of code fragments. In information retrieval similarity measures are often used to find documents similar to a given query document. This paper extends this idea to source code repositories. It introduces our approach to detect similar Java classes in software projects using tree similarity algorithms. We show how our approach allows to find similar Java classes based on an evaluation of three tree-based similarity measures in the context of five user-defined test cases as well as a preliminary software evolution analysi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MSR
• Authors: Tobias Sager, Abraham Bernstein, Martin Pinzger, Christoph Kiefer
• Keywords: Code, MSR 2006, Similar Java Classes, Similarity Measures