Pre/post conditioned slicing

Harman, Mark; Hierons, Robert M.; Fox, Chris; Danicic, Sebastian; Howroyd, John

doi:10.1109/icsm.2001.972724

Cited by 41 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(57 reference statements)

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“…Harman et al [64] presented and formalised the pre/post conditioned slicing method, which combines forward and backward conditioning to provide a unified framework for conditioned program slicing. The pre/post conditioned slicing can be used to improve the analysis of programs in terms of pre-and post-conditions.…”

Section: Conditioned Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying high-level dependence structures using slice-based dependence analysis

2009

2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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This thesis addresses dependence based concept assignment using slicing based dependence analysis on concept assignment.Concepts are domain level entities concerned with the real world. Although concepts are defined at the domain level, the source code of a program must, nonetheless, express these concepts in program code denotations. Traditional concept assignment maps the low level of source code to the high level of the domain through the medium of associations. These associations typically take the form of comments and identifiers.Previous work on the combination of dependence analysis with concept assignment gave the definition of either extending concepts to concept slices or abbreviating concepts to key statements. However, there are no empirical studies to show the feasibility of these two approaches.In this thesis, we propose an improved key statement analysis algorithm and empirically study executable concept slicing and key statement analysis using ten subject programs with more than 600 concept bindings identified. We define dependence based metrics to evaluate both approaches and to provide evidence of both advantages and disadvantages. Based on these foundations, we propose a new combination technique -concept refinement, which adopts the advantages and overcome the disadvantages of previous two approaches.The results for the same programs with the same concept bindings showed that concept refinement can produce dependence based concept bindings. The refined concept binding is smaller, but with similar impact and higher cohesion than the original HB-CA concept binding. Therefore, it becomes more precise after refinement; the refined concept binding is much smaller than the executable concept slice with respect to the original HB-CA concept binding. These findings suggest that the refined concept binding is more reasonable in size for program comprehension.Furthermore, the refined concept binding can be extracted from most of the original HB-CA concept bindings, thus concept refinement is more appropriate than the key statement analysis. DeclarationThe work presented in this thesis is original work undertaken between September

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Section: Conditioned Slicingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying high-level dependence structures using slice-based dependence analysis

2009

2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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“…The field of program slicing is concerned with computing a quotient of a program which preserves part of the behaviour of the original program. Program slicing is used in program comprehension [2,3], software maintenance [4,5,6,7], and debugging [8,9,10,11].…”

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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“…Program slicing has already been shown to be useful for software testing [8,9,13,31]. The metaball visualization techniques can further provide a very intuitive high-level interface in identifying the test coverage of a particular modules/classes.…”

Section: Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Static slicing reduces the size of the original program, but frequently still leads to slices that are rather large and difficult to analyze. Slicing has been shown to be useful in program debugging, testing, program understanding, and software maintenance [8,9,21,31]. The strength of static slicing lies in the following areas: (a) the computation of a static slice is relatively inexpensive (compared to dynamic slicing) in that only the static analysis of the source code and no program execution is required, and (b) it is useful to gain a general understanding of the program parts that contribute to the computation of a selected function with respect to all possible program executions.…”

Section: Figure 3 Sample Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Static slicing [31] derives its information through the analysis of the source code. A static program slice consists of all statements in program P that may potentially affect the value of variable v at some point p [8,9]. That is, a static slice preserves a program's behavior with respect to variable v for all possible program inputs.…”

Section: Figure 3 Sample Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

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