  Software clones have been an active area of research for the past two
decades. However, although numerous clone detection tools are now available,
only a small fraction of the literature has focused on tool evaluation, and
this is in fact still an open problem. This is mostly due to the fact that
standard information retrieval metrics such as recall and precision require a
priori knowledge of clones already in the system. Detection tools also
typically have a large number of parameters which are difficult to fine-tune
for optimal performance on a particular software system, and different outputs
produced by different tools add to the complexity of comparing one tool to
another. In this review, we further explore the reasons why tool evaluation is
still an open challenge, and present the current tools and frameworks targeted
at mitigating these problems, focusing on the current standard benchmarks used
to evaluate modern clone detection tools, and also presenting a recent method
aimed at finding optimal tool configurations.
