Theoretical foundations of dynamic program slicing

Binkley, David; Danicic, Sebastian; Gyimóthy, Tibor; Harman, Mark; Kiss, Ákos; Korel, Bogdan

doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2006.01.012

Cited by 33 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 53 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…Forward Slicing is often not executable because the challenge caused by Forward Slicing is defining the semantics captured by a forward slice [5,9,15].…”

Section: Static Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clauser: Clause Slicing Tool for C Programs

Abdallah

Tamimi

2016

IJSEIA

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“…Forward Slicing is often not executable because the challenge caused by Forward Slicing is defining the semantics captured by a forward slice [5,9,15].…”

Section: Static Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clauser: Clause Slicing Tool for C Programs

Abdallah

Tamimi

2016

IJSEIA

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“…It was claimed that conditioned slicing subsumes any other form of statement deletion based slicing method [29], i.e., the conditioned slicing criterion can be specified to obtain any form of slice. However, a more recent paper [18] showed that the subsumes relationship does not always exist-conditioned slicing does not subsume Korel and Laski dynamic slicing.…”

Section: Conditioned Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying high-level dependence structures using slice-based dependence analysis

2009

2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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This thesis addresses dependence based concept assignment using slicing based dependence analysis on concept assignment.Concepts are domain level entities concerned with the real world. Although concepts are defined at the domain level, the source code of a program must, nonetheless, express these concepts in program code denotations. Traditional concept assignment maps the low level of source code to the high level of the domain through the medium of associations. These associations typically take the form of comments and identifiers.Previous work on the combination of dependence analysis with concept assignment gave the definition of either extending concepts to concept slices or abbreviating concepts to key statements. However, there are no empirical studies to show the feasibility of these two approaches.In this thesis, we propose an improved key statement analysis algorithm and empirically study executable concept slicing and key statement analysis using ten subject programs with more than 600 concept bindings identified. We define dependence based metrics to evaluate both approaches and to provide evidence of both advantages and disadvantages. Based on these foundations, we propose a new combination technique -concept refinement, which adopts the advantages and overcome the disadvantages of previous two approaches.The results for the same programs with the same concept bindings showed that concept refinement can produce dependence based concept bindings. The refined concept binding is smaller, but with similar impact and higher cohesion than the original HB-CA concept binding. Therefore, it becomes more precise after refinement; the refined concept binding is much smaller than the executable concept slice with respect to the original HB-CA concept binding. These findings suggest that the refined concept binding is more reasonable in size for program comprehension.Furthermore, the refined concept binding can be extracted from most of the original HB-CA concept bindings, thus concept refinement is more appropriate than the key statement analysis. DeclarationThe work presented in this thesis is original work undertaken between September

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“…We have the requirement that the slice and the original program produce the same value for each variable in the chosen set V at the specified execution position and that the path in p ′ up to q ′ followed by using input x is equivalent to that formed by removing from the path T all elements not in the slice. Interestingly, it has been observed that this additional constraint, that F ront(T ′ , q ′ ) = DEL(F ront(T, q), T (i) ∈ N ′ ∧ 1 ≤ i ≤ q), means that a static slice is not necessarily a valid dynamic slice [37].…”

Section: The Path-faithful Dynamic Slicing Criterionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Theorem 11 Let S be a linear schema, let ρl ∈ pre(Π(S)) be executable, let V be a 2 Note that this almost exactly a quote from [15] and is taken from [37] set of variables and let S ′ be a quotient of S containing l.…”

Section: The Path-faithful Dynamic Slicing Criterionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the computational complexity of dynamic slicing problems for program schemas

Danicic

Hierons

Laurence

2011

Math. Struct. Comp. Sci.

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Given a program, a quotient can be obtained from it by deleting zero or more statements. The field of program slicing is concerned with computing a quotient of a program which preserves part of the behaviour of the original program. All program slicing algorithms take account of the structural properties of a program such as control dependence and data dependence rather than the semantics of its functions and predicates, and thus work, in effect, with program schemas. The dynamic slicing criterion of Korel and Laski requires only that program behaviour is preserved in cases where the original program follows a particular path, and that the slice/quotient follows this path. In this paper we formalise Korel and Laski's definition of a dynamic slice as applied to linear schemas, and also formulate a less restrictive definition in which the path through the original program need not be preserved by the slice. The less restrictive definition has the benefit of leading to smaller slices. For both definitions, we compute complexity bounds for the problems of establishing whether a given slice of a linear schema is a dynamic slice and whether a linear schema has a non-trivial dynamic slice and prove that the latter problem is NP-hard in both cases. We also give an example to prove that minimal dynamic slices (whether or not they preserve the original path) need not be unique.

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Theoretical foundations of dynamic program slicing

Cited by 33 publications

References 53 publications

Clauser: Clause Slicing Tool for C Programs

Clauser: Clause Slicing Tool for C Programs

Identifying high-level dependence structures using slice-based dependence analysis

On the computational complexity of dynamic slicing problems for program schemas

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