Application of Dynamic Slicing in Program Debugging

Abstract

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(s) of interest at some execution position. In the existing dynamic slicing tools dynamic slices are represented in a textual form, i.e., a dynamic slice is displayed to programmers in the form of highlighted statements or in the form of a subprogram. Although dynamic slicing does narrow the size of the program, it is still up to the programmer to analyze the text of a dynamic slice and identify a faulty part in the program. The textual representation of a dynamic slice does not provide much guidance in program debugging and understanding of program behavior, which frequently is a major factor in efficient debugging. During dynamic slice computation different types of information are computed and then discarded after computation of the dynamic slice. In this paper we propose new dynamic slicing related features that exploit this information to improve the process of program debugging. These features were implemented in our dynamic slicing tool that can be used for program debugging. 1