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What is a program slice?
A program slice singles out all statements
that may have affected the value of a given variable
at a specific program point. The screenshot below gives an example.
Mark Weiser, who introduced the concept two decades ago, claimed a
slice to be the mental abstraction people make when they are debugging a
program.
Slicing for refactoring
Different software engineering tasks require slightly different
notions of slices. For example, refactoring requires the computed
slices to be executable, whereas code understanding does not. A
refactoring tool must rely on a well-balanced slicing analysis,
neither too slow nor too inaccurate. Our tool is based on a
static interprocedural analysis, i.e. using statically available
information through different methods and classes.
Our approach
Several algorithms have been proposed to compute slices. There
are mainly two approaches: slicing as an iterative dataflow
equations problem and slicing as a dependence graph reachability
problem. We believe that building a graph representation of a
whole program is inappropriate in the case of refactoring where
only one slice of the same program is needed at a time. Our
approach consists of an iterative context-sensitive analysis
using inference rules which are computed on demand and cached for
possible reuse. Details can be found
here.
Links
Screenshot
Statements that do not contribute to the value of
product are removed.
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