Program slicing techniques and its applications

Sasirekha, N.; Robert, Andrew; Hemalatha, M.

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1108.1352

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Dynamic slicing [16] shows developers which program statements impact the value of a variable at a specific line of code when the program is executed with a particular input. The study of dynamic slicing dates back over thirty years and its results have been applied to, for example, debugging and fault localization, cohesion measurement, program comprehension and testing [10,18,19,21,25,32]. Dynamic slicing techniques compute program dependencies analyzing the information within the execution trace generated through program or run-time environment instrumentation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focused Dynamic Slicing for Large Applications using an Abstract Memory-Model

Soifer¹,

Garbervetsky²,

Braberman³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Dynamic slicing techniques compute program dependencies to find all statements that affect the value of a variable at a program point for a specific execution. Despite their many potential uses, applicability is limited by the fact that they typically cannot scale beyond small-sized applications. We believe that at the heart of this limitation is the use of memory references to identify data-dependencies. Particularly, working with memory references hinders distinct treatment of the code-to-be-sliced (e.g., classes the user has an interest in) from the rest of the code (including libraries and frameworks). The ability to perform a coarser-grained analysis for the code that is not under focus may provide performance gains and could become one avenue toward scalability.In this paper, we propose a novel approach that completely replaces memory reference registering and processing with a memory analysis model that works with program symbols (i.e., terms). In fact, this approach enables the alternative of not instrumenting -thus, not generating any trace-for code that is not part of the code-to-be-sliced. We report on an implementation of an abstract dynamic slicer for C#, DynAbs, and an evaluation that shows how large and relevant parts of Roslyn and Powershell -two of the largest and modern C# applications that can be found in GitHubcan be sliced for their test cases assertions in at most a few minutes. We also show how reducing the code-to-be-sliced focus can bring important speedups with marginal relative precision loss.Index terms-dynamic slicing, program slicing.

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