Advanced chopping of sequential and concurrent programs

Abstract

A chop for a source statement s and a target statement t reveals the program parts involved in conveying effects from s to t. While precise chopping algorithms for sequential programs are known, no chopping algorithm for concurrent programs has been reported at all. This work introduces six chopping algorithms for concurrent programs, which offer different degrees of precision, ranging from imprecise over context-sensitive to time-sensitive. Our evaluation on concurrent Java programs shows that context-sensitive and time-sensitive chopping reduces chop sizes significantly. We further present an extensive evaluation of chopping algorithms for sequential programs and describe a new, easy-to-implement chopping technique for sequential programs that computes fast and almost context-sensitive chops.

On Debugging the Performance of Configurable Software Systems: Developer Needs and Tailored Tool Support

“…However, after exploring various dynamic and static slicing research tools, we settled on the state-of-the-art static slicer provided by JOANA [19], as it is the most mature option. Our implementation uses JOANA to slice the system from influencing options to option hotspots, using a fixed-point chopper algorithm, which first computes a backward slice from the option hotspots, and then computes a forward slice, on the backward slice, from the influencing options [18]. For scalability and to reduce approximations, we modified JOANA to consider code coverage under the problematic and a non-problematic configurations.…”