Precise dynamic slicing algorithms

Abstract

Dynamic slicing algorithms can greatly reduce the de-bugging effort by focusing the attention of the user on a rele-vant subset of program statements. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of three precise dynamic slicing algorithms called the full preprocessing (FP), no prepro-cessing (NP) and limited preprocessing (LP) algorithms. The algorithms differ in the relative timing of construct-ing the dynamic data dependence graph and its traversal for computing requested dynamic slices. Our experiments show that the LP algorithm is a fast and practical precise slicing algorithm. In fact we show that while precise slices can be orders of magnitude smaller than imprecise dynamic slices, for small number of slicing requests, the LP algo-rithm is faster than an imprecise dynamic slicing algorithm proposed by Agrawal and Horgan.