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Duplicating a code fragment is the act of copying and pasting it with or without minor modifications into another section of the code base. Despite being an intuitive practice of code reuse, duplicate code brings its own challenges to software maintenance and evolution. To combat the propagation of duplicate code, we developed a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA called AntiCopyPaster, which tracks the pasting of code fragments inside the IDE and suggests the appropriate Extract Method refactoring. Unlike the existing approaches, our tool is integrated with the development workflow, and pro-actively recommends refactorings. Since not all code fragments need to be extracted, we develop a classification model to make this decision. When a code fragment is copy-pasted, the plugin searches for duplicates in the currently opened file, waits for a short period of time to allow the developer to edit the code, and finally inferences the refactoring decision based on a number of features. This tool can be used by educators to control the spread of duplicate code in their students code, and raise their awareness of the exitence of automated refactoring tehchniques that exist in the IDE. The plugin and its source code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/refactorings/anti-copy-paster. The demonstration video can be found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y1sbfpds2Ms.
AlOmar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.