An empirical study of predicate dependence levels and trends
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
Syntax-Directed Amorphous Slicing
Automated Software Engineering
Analysis and Visualization of Predicate Dependence on Formal Parameters and Global Variables
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A brief survey of program slicing
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
The Efficiency of Critical Slicing in Fault Localization
Software Quality Control
The interpretation and utility of three cohesion metrics for object-oriented design
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Optimizing Drain Current, Inversion Level, and Channel Length in Analog CMOS Design
Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
Empirical study of optimization techniques for massive slicing
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Dependence clusters in source code
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
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Amorphous program slicing relaxes the syntactic constraint of traditional slicing and can therefore produce considerably smaller slices. This simplification power can be used to answer questions a software engineer might have about a program by first augmenting the program to make the question explicit and then slicing out an answer. One benefit of this technique is that the answer is in the form of a program and thus, in a language that the software engineer understands well.To test the usefulness of amorphous slicing in answering such questions, the question of array access safety is considered. A safety slice, an amorphous slice of an augmented program, is used to guide a software engineer to potential array bound violations.A series of experiments was conducted to determine whether the safety slice was an effective aid to an engineer. Seventy-six subjects participated in the controlled experiments. For experiments involving novice programmers, the null hypothesis could not be rejected, and so it was not possible to conclude that amorphous slicing assisted such programmers. However, for more experienced groups, the experimental subjects (who were able to consult amorphous slices) significantly outperformed the control group. The study lends empirical support to the assertion that amorphous slicing assists program comprehension.