Current research in clone detection suffers from poor ecosystems for evaluating precision of clone detection tools. Corpora of labeled clones are scarce and incomplete, making evaluation labor intensive and idiosyncratic, and limiting intertool comparison.

We are developing InspectorClone, a system for helping measure the precision of clone detection tools. InspectorClone provides automatic mechanisms for clone validation, a user interface to facilitate manual validation of results, and tool reports. In a comparative study, the use of InspectorClone resulted in a reduction of more than 50% of clone pairs that needed human validation effort. The reduction in manual effort will vary for each clone detector and with usage of InspectorClone, but over time we expect the manual effort to go further down. InspectorClone aggregates the individual effort of multiple teams into a single evolving dataset whose quality improves over time, creating an important asset for software clone research.