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Software evolution continues throughout the life cycle of the software. During the evolution of software system, it has been observed that the developers have a tendency to copy the modules completely or partially and modify them. This practice gives rise to identical or very similar code fragments called software clones. This paper examines the evolution of clone components by using advanced time series analysis. In the first phase, software clone components are extracted from the source repository of the software application by using the abstract syntax tree approach. Then, the evolution of software clone components is analyzed. In this paper, three models, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average, back propagation neural network, and multi-objective genetic algorithm-based neural network, have been compared for the prediction of the evolution of software clone components. Evaluation is performed on the large open-source software application, ArgoUML. The ability to predict the clones helps the software developer to reduce the effort during software maintenance activities.
Pati et al. (Sun,) studied this question.