A program slicing method using lightweight dynamic information

In debugging a large‐scale program, the working efficiency will be improved if the range of debugging can be reduced from the whole source program to a narrower range in which bugs are expected to exist. Program slicing is a technique of extracting the part to consider from the program, but it has the problem that the slice extracted from the program is of large size in static slicing, and the execution overhead is increased in dynamic slicing. This paper proposes dependence cache slicing, which is characterized as intermediate between the static and the dynamic procedures. The proposed algorithm is implemented, and the execution data are acquired by using the sample program. It is found that dependence cache slicing reduces the slice size by 30 to 50% compared to the existing methods in programs containing arrays and pointers. The required overhead remains in the practical range. Thus, the proposed method is useful in debugging. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 89(11): 60–67, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.20318