Clone smells

The Clone smells tab of the project shows the suspicious, code duplication related evolution type patterns (clone smells) throughout the development history of the branch analyzed. Also, one can drill down to the code-level changes and metrics to understand what happened exactly and where.

The Clone smells section depicts the timeline of check-ins and the clone smells related to those check-ins. The diagram distinguishes between four types of clone smells: Disappearing clone instances, Appearing clone instances, Disappearing clone classes and Appearing clone classes. One can read more about these categories here.

Each clone smell is presented as a colored (and sometimes curved) bar. The colors of those bars can range from green to red depending on the number of clone classes or clone instances involved in the smell. The color green represents the lowest value of the spectrum whereas the color red represents the highest value. A slider above the diagram helps one adjust the time period investigated.

Clicking on one of the colored bars brings one to the Clones section where those clone classes or clone instances are listed which are involved in the clone smell represented by the bar one clicked on. This list also contains the metric values related to each clone class or clone instance and provides a link for the further code-level and detailed investigations.

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