November 7, 2011

Speaker: Dr. Chanchal Roy, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan

Title: Toward a Comprehensive Clone Management System

Abstract: Reusing code fragments by copying and pasting with or without minor adaptation is a common activity in software development. As a result software systems often contain sections of code that are very similar, called code clones. Previous research shows that a significant fraction (between 7% and 23%) of the code in a typical software system has been cloned. While the conventional wisdom is that clones are harmful, they can be useful in many ways and that cloning is often intentional. It is also difficult to remove clones because of the associated cost and risks. Instead of removing clones, it is thus recommended that clones should be managed efficiently and cost effectively during the evolution of the software systems. Detection and management of code clones thus becomes an active and interesting research topic in recent years. In this talk, I will first present the state of the art in clone detection and management including what we have been doing in our group towards building a comprehensive clone management system.

Biography: Chanchal Roy is an assistant professor of Software Engineering/Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. While he has been working on a broad range of topics in Computer Science, his chief research interest is Software Engineering. In particular, he is interested in software maintenance and evolution, including clone detection and analysis, program analysis, reverse engineering, empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, and search-based software engineering. He was awarded the best poster award, the best paper award, best reviewer award, and several other major awards such as NSERC Post Graduate Scholarship, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Ontario Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology, and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (declined). He served or has been serving in the program committee of major software engineering conferences (e.g., ICSM, WCRE, SCAM, IWSC etc.) and the Finance Chair of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC’11). He has been a reviewer of major Computer Science journals including IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, International Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution, Science of Computer Programming, Journal of Supercomputing, Journal of Information and Software Technology and so on. He received his PhD at Queen’s University, advised by James R. Cordy, in 2009.