A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Forward and Backward Static Slice Size and Context Sensitivity

  • Authors:
  • David Binkley;Mark Harman

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '03 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

A large-scale study of 43 C programs totaling just over 1million lines of code is presented. The study includes theforward and backward static slice on every executablestatement. In total 2,353,598 slices were constructed, withan average slice size being just under 30% of the originalprogram. The results also show that ignoring calling-contextled to a 50% increase in average slice size and, incontrast to previous results, a 66-77% increase in computationtime (due to the increased size). Though not theprincipal focus of the study, the results also show an averagepace for the slicing engine, on a standard PC, of 3million lines of code per second, thereby providing additionalevidence for static slicing's practicability.