Program slicing

In computer programming, program slicing is the computation of the set of programs statements, the program slice, that may affect the values at some point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. Program slicing can be used in debugging to locate source of errors more easily. Other applications of slicing include software maintenance, optimization, program analysis, and information flow control.

Slicing techniques have been seeing a rapid development since the original definition by Mark Weiser. At first, slicing was only static, i.e., applied on the source code with no other information than the source code. Bogdan Korel and Janusz Laski introduced dynamic slicing, which works on a specific execution of the program (for a given execution trace). Other forms of slicing exist, for instance path slicing.

Based on the original definition of Weiser, informally, a static program slice S consists of all statements in program P that may affect the value of variable v at some point p. The slice is defined for a slicing criterion C=(x,V), where x is a statement in program P and V is a subset of variables in P. A static slice includes all the statements that affect variable v for a set of all possible inputs at the point of interest (i.e., at the statement x). Static slices are computed by finding consecutive sets of indirectly relevant statements, according to data and control dependencies.

This new program is a valid slicing of the above program with respect to the criterion (write(sum),{sum}):

In fact, most static slicing techniques, including Weiser's own technique, will also remove the write(sum) statement. Since, at the statement write(sum), the value of sum is not dependent on the statement itself.

Makes use of information about a particular execution of a program. A dynamic slice contains all statements that actually affect the value of a variable at a program point for a particular execution of the program rather than all statements that may have affected the value of a variable at a program point for any arbitrary execution of the program.

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