Enhancing a hybrid pre-processing and transformation process for code clone detection in .Net application

Abstract

Pre-processing and transformation are the first two common processes that occur in a code clone detection process. The purpose of these two processes is to transform the source codes into a more representable form that can be used later on as input for code clone detection. Main issue arises in both of these processes is the application of the pre-processing and transformation rules might cause loss of critical information thus affecting the code clone detection results. Therefore, this work proposes a combination pre-processing and transformation process that can produce a better source unit representation of .Net platform source code which is C#. Net and VB.Net by enhancing an existing work that was done on Java language without affecting the critical information in the source code. The proposed enhancement was tested and the result showed that the proposed work was able to produce the expected source unit for the .Net platform languages together.