The Relationship Between Slices And Module Cohesion

Ott, Linda; Thuss, J.J.

doi:10.1109/icse.1989.714420

Cited by 28 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…program verification, maintenance, automatic parallelization of program execution, automatic integration of program versions, software metrics, etc. 17,20,[25][26][27][28] In this paper, we are primarily concerned with its use in debugging.…”

Section: Dynamic Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 6 also shows the dynamic slice with respect to a[i] on line 29 for this test case. Of the three indirect assignments on lines [25][26][27] the last two are included in the dynamic slice because values of j and k are the same for this test case, making q and r aliases to the same array element a [31. The corresponding static slice contains the entire program. Figure 7 shows a variant of the above program where a loop is used to initialize the array instead of having a separate assignment for each array element.…”

Section: Modifications To the Debuggermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Debugging with dynamic slicing and backtracking

Agrawal¹,

1993

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Programmers spend considerable time debugging code. Symbolic debuggers provide some help but the task remains complex and difficult. Other than breakpoints and tracing, these tools provide little highlevel help. Programmers must perform many tasks manually that the tools could perform automatically, such as finding which statements in the program affect the value of an output variable for a given test case, and what was the value of a given variable when the control last reached a given program location. If debugging tools provided explicit support for these tasks, the debugging process could be automated to a significant extent.In this paper we present a debugging model, based on dynamic program slicing and execution backtracking techniques, that easily lends itself to automation. This model is based on experience with using these techniques to debug soflware. We also present a prototype debugging tool, SPYDER, that explicitly supports the proposed model, and with which we are performing further debugging research. * The figures are X Window System window dumps of our prototype debugging tool, SPYDER, in operation. t A test case consists of a specific set of run-time input values. $ We will refer to this test case as the test case no. 1 in later sections. DEBUGGING WITH DYNAMIC SLICING AND BACKTRACKING :b", i + l ) t 1 doppsd at. l l m 43. > c l s s > clear > dyaric prop.= slice m "areaat lim 43 Currat Teatcsw It: 1 * 591 Figure 1. Dynamic program slice with respect to area on line 43 during the second loop iteration for test case no. I H . AGRAWAL, R. A. DEMILLO AND E. H. SI'AFFORD * SPYDER indicates the next statement to be executed by an arrow in the left margin of the code window. See, e.g., Figure 4.

show abstract

Section: Dynamic Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modifications To the Debuggermentioning

confidence: 99%

Debugging with dynamic slicing and backtracking

Agrawal¹,

1993

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Ott and Thuss showed that slice‐based measures are sensitive to changes and that they have the potential to quantify deterioration processes . This sensitiveness was also demonstrated on sample Z specifications by Bollin , and the idea is now to make use of the measures to estimate the effect of maintenance actions applied to formal Z specifications.…”

Section: Specification Measuresmentioning

confidence: 86%

Metrics for quantifying evolutionary changes in Z specifications

Bollin

2013

J Software Evolu Process

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

SUMMARYThis article proposes metrics for quantifying changes throughout the evolution of formal software specifications in long living systems. Formal specifications play an important role in the software development life-cycle by supporting refinement and proof and by providing a basis for comprehension and maintenance activities. However, specifications also undergo evolutionary changes, and these changes are hard to assess because of a lack of suitable measures.This paper proposes and analyzes a set of measures for estimating aspects of a specification's complexity and quality. The measures are based on existing measures for source code, but they have been redefined in the scope of formal Z specifications. Geared towards Z, they are then evaluated concerning their expressiveness by a case study that comprises more than 65,000 lines of specification text. Finally, the usability of the measures is demonstrated on the Z specification of the Web Service Definition Language during its evolution over a period of about 3 years.

show abstract

“…Weiser [185] defined several metrics, which were later found to be related to cohesion [122], that have since been further studied, refined and added to by others [80,149,150]: tightness the ratio of the size of the slice intersection to the total module length.…”

Section: Cohesionmentioning

confidence: 99%