Experimental evaluation of using dynamic slices for fault location

Abstract

Dynamic slicing algorithms have been considered to aid in debugging for many years. However, as far as we know, no detailed studies on evaluating the benefits of using dynamic slicing for detecting faulty statements in programs have been carried out. We have developed a dynamic slicing framework that uses dynamic instrumentation to efficiently collect dynamic slices and reduced ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (roBDDs) to compactly store them. We have used the above framework to implement three variants of dynamic slicing algorithms including: data slicing, full slicing, and relevant slicing algorithms. We have carried out detailed experiments to evaluate these algorithms. Our results show that full slices and relevant slices can considerably reduce the subset of program statements that need to be examined to locate faulty statements. We expect that the observations presented here will enable development of new slicing based algorithms for automated debugging.

Software Fault Localization

“…To exclude such extra statements from a dice (as well as a slice), we need to use dynamic slicing instead. Studies such as [2], [19], [31] use the dynamic slicing concept to program debugging.…”

Interactive Fault Localization Using Test Information

“…These two approaches are both based on the collection of predicates, whereas our interactive approaches are based on the execution information. Besides the preceding approaches, Zhang et al [18] explored the effectiveness of three dynamic slicing techniques (data slicing, full slicing and relevant slicing) on fault localization. Their later work [19] proposed the concept of critical predicates, and uses critical predicates with other slicing techniques to locate faults.…”

Localizing Program Errors via Slicing and Reasoning

“…Compared our result with the one of [9,10,20], our method is more precise. We make other assumptions such as AB (2), AB(4), AB (6) and AB (14). They are all not correct, so the diagnosis of the program according to this counterexample is a two-fault diagnosis.…”

“…Program slicing especially dynamic slicing [7,14,18] can be used to find the set of statements in an error trace that may be relevant to the cause of the error. Given a faulty statement or a variable of interest, a dynamic slicing algorithm identifies a subset of executed statements that influenced the computation of this statement or variable.…”