A mutation analysis based benchmarking framework for clone detectors

Abstract In recent years, an abundant number of clone detectors have been proposed in literature. However, most of the tool papers have lacked a solid performance evaluation of the subject tools. This is due both to the lack of an available and reliable benchmark, and the manual efforts required to hand check a large number of candidate clones. In this tool demonstration paper we show how a mutation analysis based benchmarking framework can be used by developers and researchers to evaluate clone detection tools at a fine granularity with minimal effort.