Abstract

The conventional notion of a program slice---the set of all statements that might affect the value of a variable occurrence---is totally independent of the program input values. Program debugging, however, involves analyzing the program behavior under the specific inputs that revealed the bug. In this paper we address the dynamic counterpart of the static slicing problem---finding all statements that really affected the value of a variable occurrence for the given program inputs. Several approaches for computing dynamic slices are examined. The notion of a Dynamic Dependence Graph and its use in computing dynamic slices is discussed. We introduce the concept of a Reduced Dynamic Dependence Graph whose size does not depend on the length of execution history, which is unbounded in general, but whose size is bounded and is proportional to the number of dynamic slices arising during the program execution.

Citations