Program Slicing

  • Authors:
  • Mark Weiser

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1984

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Abstract

Program slicing is a method for automatically decomposing programs by analyzing their data flow and control flow. Starting from a subset of a program's behavior, slicing reduces that program to a minimal form which still produces that behavior. The reduced program, called a ``slice,'' is an independent program guaranteed to represent faithfully the original program within the domain of the specified subset of behavior. Some properties of slices are presented. In particular, finding statement-minimal slices is in general unsolvable, but using data flow analysis is sufficient to find approximate slices. Potential applications include automatic slicing tools for debuggng and parallel processing of slices.