IWSC 2013 - 7th International Workshop on Software Clones

Software clones are often a result of copying and pasting as an act of ad-hoc reuse by programmers, and can occur at many levels, from simple statement sequences to blocks, methods, classes, source files, subsystems, models, architectures and entire designs, and in all software artifacts (code, models, requirements or architecture documentation etc.). Software clone research is of high relevance for software engineering research and practice today.
Many alternative techniques have been proposed for detecting clones. There are also lines of research that evaluate these approaches, reason about ways to remove clones, assess the effect of clones on maintainability, track their evolution, and investigate root causes of clones. Today, research in software clones is an established field with hundreds of publications in various conferences and journals, including ICSE and TSE. A partial list of the topics is as follows (this list is by no means exhaustive, and it is a goal of the workshop to further extend it):
Use cases of clone management in the software lifecycle
Experiences with clone management in practice
Types, distribution, and nature of clones in software systems
Causes and effects of clones
Techniques and algorithms for clone detection, analysis, and management
Clone and clone patterns visualization
Tools and systems for detecting software clones
Applications of clone detection and analysis
System architecture and clones
Effect of clones to system complexity and quality
Clone analysis in families of similar systems
Measures of code similarity
Economic and trade-off models for clone removal
Evaluation and benchmarking of clone detection methods
Licensing and plagiarism issues
Clone-aware software design and development
Refactoring through clone analysis
Higher-level clones in models and designs
Clone evolution and variation
Role of clones in software system evolution
New focus theme of this IWSC: A recent Dagstuhl seminar on software clones has shown that a clear understanding of real use cases in clone management is a fundamental prerequisite for categorizing, evaluating and directing future research in this area. For this reason, this IWSC will emphasize clone management in practice, that is, use cases and experiences with clones and clone management in the software lifecycle.