Dynamic program slicing

Agrawal, Hiralal; Horgan, J.R.

doi:10.1145/93548.93576

Cited by 311 publications

(283 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Static slicing [52] identifies a subset of program statements that may influence the value of a variable at a program location. Dynamic slicing [53][54][55] finds the statements that actually do influence a variable value in a particular execution. Relevant Slicing [56,57] is similar to dynamic slicing, but additionally finds statements that can potentially influence a variable value in an execution, if a predicate were to evaluate to a different outcome.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Isolating bugs in multithreaded programs using execution suppression

et al. 2011

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SUMMARYMemory-related program failures in multithreaded programs can be caused by a variety of bugs. Concurrency bugs can occur due to unexpected or incorrect thread interleavings during execution. Other kinds of memory bugs, such as buffer overflows and uninitialized reads, may also occur in multithreaded as well as single-threaded programs. Most prior techniques for isolating these bugs are specialized, addressing only one type of concurrency bug or certain types of other memory bugs. The memory corruption caused by these bugs can also undergo significant propagation during program execution. When a program failure finally occurs due to memory corruption, the true root cause of the failure may be effectively concealed as significant portions of memory may have become corrupted. We propose a general framework that can isolate the root cause of any failure in a multithreaded program that involves memory corruption and reveals at least a subset of this memory corruption. This includes three important types of concurrency bugs-data races, atomicity violations, and order violations-as well as other kinds of memory bugs. To account for propagation of memory corruption, our approach uses a dynamic technique called 'execution suppression' that iteratively reveals memory corruption in a failing execution to isolate the true root cause of the failure.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Isolating bugs in multithreaded programs using execution suppression

et al. 2011

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“…Dynamic slicing [Agrawal and Horgan 1990;Gyimóthy et al 1999] is a variant of slicing that takes into account program execution trace information. Specifically, dynamic slicing only considers program dependencies that occur in a specific execution of the program.…”

Section: Dynamic Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Topology analysis of software dependencies

Robillard

2008

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Before performing a modification task, a developer usually has to investigate the source code of a system to understand how to carry out the task. Discovering the code relevant to a change task is costly because it is a human activity whose success depends on a large number of unpredictable factors, such as intuition and luck. Although studies have shown that effective developers tend to explore a program by following structural dependencies, no methodology is available to guide their navigation through the thousands of dependency paths found in a nontrivial program. We describe a technique to automatically propose and rank program elements that are potentially interesting to a developer investigating source code. Our technique is based on an analysis of the topology of structural dependencies in a program. It takes as input a set of program elements of interest to a developer and produces a fuzzy set describing other elements of potential interest. Empirical evaluation of our technique indicates that it can help developers quickly select program elements worthy of investigation while avoiding less interesting ones.

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“…As originally formulated by Korel and Laski [15], a dynamic slice of a program P is defined by three parameters besides P , namely a variable set V , an initial input state d and an integer n. The slice with respect to these parameters is required to follow the same path as P up to the nth statement (with statements not lying in the slice deleted from the path through the slice) and give the same value for each element of V as P after the nth statement after execution from the initial state d. Many dynamic slicing algorithms have been written [16,17,18,19,20,15,21,22]. Most of these compute a slice using the data and control dependence relations along the given path through the original program.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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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Dynamic program slicing

Cited by 311 publications

References 9 publications

Isolating bugs in multithreaded programs using execution suppression

Isolating bugs in multithreaded programs using execution suppression

Topology analysis of software dependencies

On the computational complexity of dynamic slicing problems for program schemas

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