In this post we’ll take a look at the first result from the Code Clone Analysis, and do some refactoring to eliminate the duplication.  The first result indicated that it found an exact match repeated 14 times across the solution, with 18 lines of duplicated code in each of the 14 blocks.

Net Lines Of Code Deleted: 179

In this case the code in question was a bunch of classes representing the various Bosses.  Every Boss class has a constructor that initializes a whole bunch of properties of that boss, however, for most bosses a lot of these are simply set to 0’s.

Every Boss class inherits from the class MultiDiffBoss, so I simply moved all the initialization of the various properties to the base class constructor, and left it up to the Boss subclasses to only set those that are different than the default values.

In this case there are actually 22 Boss subclasses, however, due to some inconsistencies in the code structure Code Clone only identified 14 of them as identical blocks.  Since I was in there refactoring the 14 identified already, it was pretty straightforward to identify the other 8 subclasses that had the same duplicated behavior and refactor those also.

Note: Code Clone Analysis is pretty slow right now.  It takes approx 1 min to build this solution, but it takes 9 mins to run Code Clone Analysis.  Personally, if the results are high quality I’m OK with it taking a long time to run since I don’t expect it’s something I would be running all that often.  However, it would be nice to be able to run it as part of a nightly build, but at this time I don’t believe it’s possible to run outside of Visual Studio due to a dependency on the meta-data available in the VS environment.