A Survey of Program Slicing Techniques.

Abstract

A program slice consists of the parts of a program that (potentially) affect the values computed at some point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. The task of computing program slices is called program slicing. The original definition of a program slice was presented by Weiser in 1979. Since then, various slightly different notions of program slices have been proposed, as well as a number of methods to compute them. An important distinction is that between a static and a dynamic slice. The former notion is computed without making assumptions regarding a program's input, whereas the latter relies on some specific test case. Procedures, arbitrary control flow, composite datatypes and pointers, and interprocess communication each require a specific solution. We classify static and dynamic slicing methods for each of these features, and compare their accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, the possibilities for combining solutions for different features are investigated. We discuss...