Central Concerns and Questions

There is much hidden knowledge in existing large software that can be valuable for improving software quality and productivity. Code clones, similar pieces of code that repeatedly occur in a code base, are a particularly interesting kind of knowledge. Detecting, tracking, and managing code clones efficiently and accurately have many important applications, such as program understanding, refactoring, optimisation, and bug detection, and thus play an important role in improving software quality, reducing maintenance cost, and increasing development productivity.

Emerging Ideas and Initiatives

We are innovating techniques and tools for the following objectives: (1) efficient detection of both syntactic and semantic clones, (2) classification of clone patterns, (3) code refactoring, (4) clone-related bug detection and prevention, (5) construction of a code library for easy reuse, and (6) development of search-assisted programming paradigm.

Selected Publications

[1] Lingxiao Jiang and Zhendong Su. Automatic Mining of Functionally Equivalent Code Fragments Via Random Testing. Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'09), pages 81-92, Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 19-23, 2009. ACM.

[2] Mark Gabel, Lingxiao Jiang, and Zhendong Su. Scalable Detection of Semantic Clones. Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'08), pages 321-330, Leipzig, Germany, May 10-18, 2008. ACM.

[3] Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, and Edwin Chiu. Context-Based Detection of Clone-Related Bugs. Proceedings of the 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE'07), pages 55-64, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 3-7, 2007. ACM.

[4] Lingxiao Jiang, Ghassan Misherghi, Zhendong Su, and Stéphane Glondu. DECKARD: Scalable and Accurate Tree-based Detection of Code Clones. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07), pages 96-105, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, May 20-26, 2007. IEEE Computer Society.

Projects, Presentations and Posters

1. Lingxiao Jiang and Zhendong Su. Automatic Mining of Functionally Equivalent Code Fragments Via Random Testing (slides)
2. Mark Gabel, Lingxiao Jiang, and Zhendong Su. Scalable Detection of Semantic Clones (slides)
3. Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, and Edwin Chiu. Context-Based Detection of Clone-Related Bugs (slides)
4. Lingxiao Jiang, Ghassan Misherghi, Zhendong Su, and Stéphane Glondu. DECKARD: Scalable and Accurate Tree-based Detection of Code Clones (slides)

Collaborations and Industry Linkages

1. Center for Software Systems Research , University of California, Davis.