Because 50% to 90% of developer effort during software maintenance is spent on program comprehension activities, techniques and tools that can reduce the effort spent by developers on these activities are required to reduce maintenance costs. One characteristic of a software system that can adversely affect its comprehensibility is the presence of similar or identical segments of code, or code clones. In this video, Nicholas A. Kraft describes preliminary work on code clone categorization that he is leading at The University of Alabama. In particular, he describes the development of techniques and tools for categorization of code clones using structural and semantic properties of the clones.
