A formal model of program dependences and its implications for software testing, debugging, and maintenance (1990)
| Venue: | IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering |
| Citations: | 124 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Podgurski90aformal,
author = {Andy Podgurski and Lori and A. Clarke},
title = {A formal model of program dependences and its implications for software testing, debugging, and maintenance},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering},
year = {1990},
volume = {16},
pages = {965--979}
}
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Abstract
Abstract-A formal, general model of program dependences is pre-sented and used to evaluate several dependence-based software testing, debugging, and maintenance techniques. Two generalizations of con-trol and data flow dependence, called weak and strong syntactic de-pendence, are introduced and related to a concept called semantic de-pendence. Semantic dependence models the ability of a program statement to affect the execution behavior of other statements. It is shown, among other things, that weak syntactic dependence is a nec-essary but not sufficient condition for semantic dependence and that strong syntactic dependence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a restricted form of semantic dependence that is finitely demon-strated. These results are then used to support some proposed uses of program dependences, to controvert others, and to suggest new uses.
