A brief survey of program slicing

Abstract

Program slicing is a technique to extract program parts with respect to some special computation. Since Weiser first proposed the notion of slicing in 1979, hundreds of papers have been presented in this area. Tens of variants of slicing have been studied, as well as algorithms to compute them. Different notions of slicing have different properties and different applications. These notions vary from Weiser's syntax-preserving static slicing to amorphous slicing which is not syntax-preserving, and the algorithms can be based on dataflow equations, information-flow relations or dependence graphs.Slicing was first-developed to facilitate debugging, but it is then found helpful in many aspects of the software development life cycle, including program debugging, software testing, software measurement, program comprehension, software maintenance, program parallelization and so on.Over the last two decades, several surveys on program slicing have been presented. However, most of them only reviewed parts of researches on program slicing or have now been out of date. People who are interested in program slicing need more information about the up to date researches. Our survey fills this gap. In this paper, we briefly review most of existing slicing techniques including static slicing, dynamic slicing and the latest slicing techniques. We also discuss the contribution of each work and compare the major difference between them. Researches on slicing are classified by the research hot spots such that people can be kept informed of the overall program slicing researches.

Next-preserving branching bisimulation

“…The technique utilises flow information of the model and dependencies between its elements to eliminate parts which are not relevant to a specific criteria, called the slicing criteria. Slicing has been defined for various programming languages (for an overview see [22,23]) and lately also for a number of formal modelling notations (e.g., [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33]). Slicing of a formal model is of particular interest if an automated analysis of the model is intended, using for example a model checker.…”

Macro Impact Analysis Using Macro Slicing

“…Over the years, a number of algorithms to compute program slices has been developed; for an overview see (Tip, 1995;Xu et al, 2005). One of the most cited approaches is to apply a pre-computation step in which a representation of the program under investigation is constructed first, which captures the dependences among program elements (for instance, data dependences).…”

An Abstraction Technique for Testing Decomposable Systems by Model Checking

“…Indeed, they can guarantee validity of a property in the original model if the property is verified in the abstract model, but they may not guarantee to find the right counterexample if the property is false. Other classical abstractions (like slicing [21] or reduction techniques like finite focus [1] that soundly reduces a state machine) reduce the original specification to a smaller one for which it may be easier to find the desired tests; however, they may miss parts of the system specification that are necessary for building the tests.…”