An important element of understanding a software code base is to identify the repetitive patterns of code it contains and how these evolve over time. Some patterns are useful to the software, and may be modularized. Others are detrimental to the software, such as patterns that represent defects. In this case, it is useful to study the occurrences of such patterns, to identify properties such as when and why they are introduced, how long they persist, and the reasons why they are corrected.
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Palix et al. (2010) studied this question.
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