An Empirical Assessment of Bellon's Clone Benchmark

• Main Authors: CHARPENTIER, Alan, FALLERI, Jean-Rémy, LO, David, REVEILLERE, Laurent
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Code clone; Empirical study; Software metrics; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3092; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4092/viewcontent/ease15_clone.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Context: Clone benchmarks are essential to the assessment and improvement of clone detection tools and algorithms. Among existing benchmarks, Bellon's benchmark is widely used by the research community. However, a serious threat to the validity of this benchmark is that reference clones it contains have been manually validated by Bellon alone. Other persons may disagree with Bellon's judgment. Objective: In this paper, we perform an empirical assessment of Bellon's benchmark. Method: We seek the opinion of eighteen participants on a subset of Bellon's benchmark to determine if researchers should trust the reference clones it contains. Results: Our experiment shows that a significant amount of the reference clones are debatable, and this phenomenon can introduce noise in results obtained using this benchmark.