A systematic literature review of code clone prevention approaches

Abstract

Code clones are copies of identical instances or fragments of source codes in a system. This happens due to programmers’ copy and paste technique as a quick way in writing source code. In order to control the occurrence of code clones, a number of studies have introduced code clone prevention to avoid the occurrence of code clone. Therefore, this paper systematically reviews the works done in preventing code clone occurrence through code clone prevention approaches. The aim of this paper is to present the systematic literature review of state-of-the art in code clone prevention. The study includes the results and discussion of the review that lead to some suggested future work as an improvement of existing code clone prevention approaches.