The Last Line Effect

The Last Line Effect. Abstract: Micro-clones are tiny duplicated pieces of code; they typically comprise only a few statements or lines. In this paper, we expose the “last line effect”, the phenomenon that the last line or statement in a micro-clone is much more likely to contain an error than the previous lines or statements. We do this by analyzing 208 open source projects and reporting on 202 faulty micro-clones.
PDF file: http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~mbelle...t_preprint.pdf