Development of a Tool for Slicing of Object-Oriented Program

Program slicing has many applications in a software development environment such as debugging, testing, anomaly detection, program understanding and many more. The concept being introduced by Weiser and it was started with static slicing calculation. Talking about static slicing, it is a subset of statements of a program which directly or indirectly affect the values of the variables computed providing a slicing criterion. Dynamic slicing is the counterpart of the static slicing i.e finding the statements which are really affected by giving the particular input value of the variable. Object-Oriented Program(OOP) has been the most widely used software development technique. OOP is still popular among many companies for their product development.There are some drawbacks of the OOP implementation. One of them is cross-cutting concerns. Aspect-Oriented Program provides separation of cross-cutting concerns from the core modules by introducing a new unit of modularization, called Aspect. In this project, we have developed a Tool which creates System dependence Graph(SDG) which is the intermediate representation of an OOP and AOP , then takes that SDG as input to compute the slicing of that program with respect to slicing criterion

Dynamic slicing of aspect oriented programs

As software application grows larger and become more complex, program maintenance activities such as adding new functionality, debugging and testing consume increasing amount of available resources for software development. In order to cope with this increased complexity, programmer need effective computer supported methods for decomposition and dependence analysis of programs. Program slicing is one method for such decomposition and dependence analysis. Program slicing is a decomposition technique which extracts program elements related to a particular computation from a program. A program slice consists of those parts of a program that may directly or indirectly affect the values computed at some program point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. A program slice can be static or dynamic. Static slice contains all the statements that may affect the slicing criterion for every possible inputs to the program. Dynamic slice contains only those statements that actually affect the slicing criterion for a particular input to the program. Aspect-oriented programming is a new programming technique proposed for cleanly modularizing the cross- cutting structure of concerns. An aspect is an area of concern that cuts across the structure of a program. The main idea behind aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is to allow a program to be constructed by describing each concern separately. Aspect J is an aspect-oriented extension to the Java programming language. Aspect J adds new concepts and associated constructs called join points, pointcuts, advices, introductions, and aspects to Java. Zhao developed the aspect-oriented system dependence graph (ASDG) to represent aspect-oriented programs and used two-pass slicing algorithm to compute static slice of aspect-oriented programs. But the disadvantage of his ASDG is that the weaving process is not represented correctly and this graph cannot be used for dynamic slicing. Our objective was to develop a suitable intermediate representation of an aspectoriented program and to develop suitable dynamic slicing technique

Dynamic Slice of Aspect Oriented Program A Comparative Study

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a budding latest technology for separating crosscutting concerns . It is very difficult to achieve cross cutting concerns in object - oriented programming (OOP). AOP is generally suitable for the area where code scattering and code tangling arises. Due to the specific features of AOP language such as joinpoint, point - cut, advice and introduction, it is difficult to apply existing slicing algorithms of procedural or object - oriented programming directly to AOP. This paper addresses different types of program slicing approaches for AOP by considering a very simple example. Also this paper addresses a new approach to calculate the dynamic slice of AOP. The complexity of this algorithm is better as compared to some existing algorithms

Dynamic Slicing of Object-Oriented and Aspect-Oriented Softwares

Slicing is generally based on program code. An alternative approach to compute the slice is from specifications developed using formalism such as Unified Modeling Languages(UML). UML is widely used for object-oriented modeling and design. In our research, we focus on UML communication diagram to compute the dynamic slices. We first develop a suitable intermediate representation for communication diagram named as Communication Dependence Graph (CoDG). Then, we propose two dynamic slicing algorithms. We have named the first algorithm edge marking dynamic slicing algorithm for communnication diagram (EMACD) and the second node-marking dynamic slicing algorithm for communnication diagram (NMACD). We have implemented our algorithms and also calculated the space and time complexity. Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP) is a recent programming paradigm that focuses on modular implementations of various crosscutting concerns. In our research, we proposed a technique for dynamic slicing of aspect-oriented software based on the UML communication diagram. Next, we generate an intermediate representation from the communication diagram which we named as Communication Aspect Dependency Graph (CADG). Then, we proposed an edge marking dynamic slicing algorithm named as Aspect-Oriented Edge Marking Algorithm (AOEM). The novelty in our approach is that we present the communication diagram for the aspect-oriented software. We have implemented the algorithm and also found the space and time complexity of the algorithm

Slicing of Aspect-Oriented Software and Its Application to Software Refactoring

This thesis first presents some program slicing techniques for Aspect-Oriented Programs (AOPs) and then presents a technique for refactoring of software using the proposed slicing technique. Main aim of all the proposed slicing algorithms in this thesis is to compute accurate and precise dynamic slices of AOPs. In order to compute the slices of aspect-oriented programs, first we extend the System Dependence Graph (SDG) for Object-Oriented Programs (OOPs) to handle AOPs. We have named the extended SDG Extended Aspect-Oriented System Dependence Graph (EAOSDG). The EAOSDG successfully represents different aspect- oriented features such as class representation, method invocation, inheritance, aspect declaration, point-cuts, advices etc. The EAOSDG of an aspect-oriented program consists of System Dependence Graph (SDG) for the non-aspect code, a group of Aspect-Oriented Dependence Graphs (ADGs) for aspect code and some additional dependence edges that are used to connect the SDG of the non-aspect code (base code) to ADG of the aspect code. Then, we propose an extended two-phase algorithm to compute the static slices of AOPs, using the proposed EAOSDG. Subsequently, we present a context-sensitive slicing algorithm to compute the dynamic slices of AOPs, using the proposed EAOSDG. The context-sensitivity makes the computed slice more precise and accurate. We have developed a slicer to implement our proposed algorithms. We have compared the performance of extended two-phase algorithm and context-sensitive algorithm, in terms of the average slice extraction time. We have considered five open source projects for comparison of slicing algorithms. We have observed that the context-sensitive algorithm computes the slices faster than the extended-two phase algorithm. Next, we extends our intermediate representation (EAOSDG) to be able to represent concurrent aspect-oriented programs. We have named this intermediate representation Multithreaded Aspect-Oriented Dependence Graph (MAODG). Our MAODG correcly represents the concurrency dependencies in concurrent AOPs. Then, we extend our context-sensitive dynamic slicing technique to handle concurrent AOPs having multiple threads. We have named our algorithm Context-Sensitive Concurrent Aspect (CSCA) slicing algorithm. Due to the presence of inter-thread synchronization and communication dependencies, some control and data flows in the threads become interdependent. This interdependency causes difficulty in finding accurate slices of concurrent AOPs. Our algorithm takes the MAODG of the concurrent AOP and a slicing criterion as input and vii computes the dynamic slice for the given concurrent AOP. We have developed a slicer Concurrent AspectJ slicer to implement our proposed CSCA algorithm. We have compared CSCA algorithm with two other existing algorithms using five case studies. The experiment shows that, our proposed CSCA algorithm computes precise slices in less time as compared to the other two existing algorithms. Further, we propose an approach for dynamic slicing of distributed AOPs. We first represent distributed aspect-oriented program using dependence based intermediate representation which we have named Distributed Aspect Dependence Graph (DADG). Based on the DADG, we present a slicing algorithm Parallel Context-sensitive Dynamic Slicing (PCDS) algorithm for distributed AOPs. We introduce parallelism in our algorithm to make slice computation faster. We have developed a tool called D-AspectJ slicer to implement the PCDS algorithm. The proposed slicing algorithm is compared with two other existing algorithms using seven case studies. The experimentation shows that our proposed PCDS algorithm generates smaller slices in less time as compared to the other two existing algorithms. Finally, we present a technique for software refactoring using program slicing. We use slice-based cohesion metrics to identify the target methods of a software that require refactoring. After identifying the target methods, we use program slicing to divide the target method into two parts. Then, we use the concept of aspects to alter the code structure in a manner that does not change the external behavior of the original module. We have implemented our proposed refactoring technique and evaluated its effectiveness through eleven case studies. We have also evaluated the effect of our proposed refactoring technique based on an open source code coverage tool EclEmm

A Graph Coloring Approach to Dynamic Slicing of Object-Oriented Programs

Program slicing is a decomposition technique, which produces a subprogram from the parent program relevant to a particular computation. Hence slicing is also regarded as a program transformation technique. A dynamic program slice is an executable part of a program whose behavior is identical, for the same program input, to that of the original program with respect to a variable of interest at some execution position. Dynamic slices are smaller than static slice, which can be used eciently in dierent software engineering activities like program testing, debugging, software maintenance, program comprehension etc. In this dissertation, we present our work concerned with the dynamic slicing of object-oriented programs. We have developed a novel algorithm, which incorporates graph coloring technique to compute dynamic slice of object-oriented programs. But in order to achieve the goal efficiently, we have contradicted the constraints of the traditional graph coloring theory. Moreover, the state restriction of the slicing criterion is taken into consideration, in addition to the dependence analysis. The advantage of our algorithm is that, it is more time ecient than the existing algorithms. We have named this algorithm, as Contradictory Graph Coloring Algorithm (CGCA)

An Analysis of the Current Program Slicing and Algorithmic Debugging Based Techniques

This thesis presents a classification of program slicing based techniques. The classification allows us to identify the differences between existing techniques, but it also allows us to predict new slicing techniques. The study identifies and compares the dimensions that influence current techniques.Silva Galiana, JF. (2008). An Analysis of the Current Program Slicing and Algorithmic Debugging Based Techniques. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/14300Archivo delegad

Slicing of Web Applications Using Source Code Analysis

Program slicing revealed a useful way to limit the search of software defects during debugging and to better understand the decomposition of the application into computations. The web application is very widely used for spreading business throughout the world. To meet the desire of the customers, web applications should have more quality and robustness. Slicing, in the ?eld of web application, helps disclosing relevant information and understanding the internal system structure. This in turn helps in debugging, testing and in improving the program comprehensibility. The system dependence graph is an appropriate data structure for slice computation, in that it explicitly represents all dependencies that have to be taken into account in slice determination. We have extended the system dependence graph to Web-Application Dependence Graph (WADG). We have developed a partial tool for automatic generation of the WADG and computation of slices. In our literature survey, we found that most of the automatic graph generation tools are byte-code based. But, our tool uses the dependency analysis from the source code of the given program. We have presented three case studies by taking open source web programs and applying our techniques and slicing algorithm. We have found that the slices computed is correct and precise, which will be help full for program debugging and testing. Construction of the system dependence graph for Web applications is complicated by the presence of dynamic code. In fact, a Web application builds the HTML code to be transmitted to the browser at run time. Knowledge of such code is essential for slicing

A review of slicing techniques in software engineering

Program slice is the part of program that may take the program off the path of the desired output at some point of its execution. Such point is known as the slicing criterion. This point is generally identified at a location in a given program coupled with the subset of variables of program. This process in which program slices are computed is called program slicing. Weiser was the person who gave the original definition of program slice in 1979. Since its first definition, many ideas related to the program slice have been formulated along with the numerous numbers of techniques to compute program slice. Meanwhile, distinction between the static slice and dynamic slice was also made. Program slicing is now among the most useful techniques that can fetch the particular elements of a program which are related to a particular computation. Quite a large numbers of variants for the program slicing have been analyzed along with the algorithms to compute the slice. Model based slicing split the large architectures of software into smaller sub models during early stages of SDLC. Software testing is regarded as an activity to evaluate the functionality and features of a system. It verifies whether the system is meeting the requirement or not. A common practice now is to extract the sub models out of the giant models based upon the slicing criteria. Process of model based slicing is utilized to extract the desired lump out of slice diagram. This specific survey focuses on slicing techniques in the fields of numerous programing paradigms like web applications, object oriented, and components based. Owing to the efforts of various researchers, this technique has been extended to numerous other platforms that include debugging of program, program integration and analysis, testing and maintenance of software, reengineering, and reverse engineering. This survey portrays on the role of model based slicing and various techniques that are being taken on to compute the slices