Publications

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Mihai Balint, Tudor Gîrba, and Radu Marinescu. How Developers Copy. In Proceedings of International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2006), p. 56—65, 2006. DOI PDF →
Abstract
Copy-paste programming is dangerous as it may lead to hidden dependencies between different parts of the system. Modifying clones is not always straight forward, because we might not know all the places that need modification. This is even more of a problem when several developers need to know about how to change the clones. In this paper, we correlate the code clones with the time of the modification and with the developer that performed the modification to detect patterns of how developers copy from one another. We develop a visualization, named Clone Evolution View, to represent the evolution of the duplicated code. We show the relevance of our approach on several large case studies and we distill our experience in forms of interesting copy patterns.

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Most of my early papers are related to my PhD thesis and deal with evolution analysis.

The essence of my PhD can be found in a journal article published in JSME.

Since 2005 I got involved in various projects and I co-authored publications on topics mostly in the reengineering area.

We reported on the Story of the Moose and the role of Smalltalk and meta-modeling in its development.

Other works relate to semantic analysis or dynamic analysis. A particular topic that continues to capture my attention is identifying how teams work. Thus, I worked on correlating authorship information with code duplication or feature development

I also got involved in dynamic analysis. I worked on identifying features and their evolution, and I participated in the development of object-flow analysis, a novel dynamic analysis that led to a publication that received the distinguished paper award at ECOOP 2008.

Visualization and interaction are crosscutting concerns in my research. The experience resulted in the development of Mondrian, and of Glamour.