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Program slicing

Author:

Mark WeiserAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '81: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Software engineering

Pages 439 - 449

Published: 09 March 1981 Publication History

Abstract

Program slicing is a method used by experienced computer programmers for abstracting from programs. Starting from a subset of a program's behavior, slicing reduces that program to a minimal form which still produces that behavior. The reduced program, called a “slice”, is an independent program guaranteed to faithfully represent the original program within the domain of the specified subset of behavior.

Finding a slice is in general unsolvable. A dataflow algorithm is presented for approximating slices when the behavior subset is specified as the values of a set of variables at a statement. Experimental evidence is presented that these slices are used by programmers during debugging. Experience with two automatic slicing tools is summarized. New measures of program complexity are suggested based on the organization of a program's slices.

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Cited By

Godbole ACheang KManerkar YSeshia STsafrir DMusuvathi MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Lifting Micro-Update Models from RTL for Formal Security AnalysisProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3620665.3640418(631-648)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
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Kim TChoi JHeo KCha SCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)DAFLProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620513(4931-4948)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
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Index Terms

Program slicing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods

Recommendations

A brief survey of program slicing

Program slicing is a technique to extract program parts with respect to some special computation. Since Weiser first proposed the notion of slicing in 1979, hundreds of papers have been presented in this area. Tens of variants of slicing have been ...
Program Slicing

Program slicing is a method for automatically decomposing programs by analyzing their data flow and control flow. Starting from a subset of a program's behavior, slicing reduces that program to a minimal form which still produces that behavior. The ...
Comments on Program Slicing

This correspondence points out some of the problems with Weiser's algorithm [5] for computing program slices. Corrections are made to Weiser's algorithm. It is shown how Weiser's algorithm can be amended to handle loops. Advantages of the Bergeretti and ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '81: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Software engineering

March 1981

468 pages

ISBN:0897911466

Chairmen:
S. Jeffrey,
L. Stucki

Sponsors

NBS: National Bureau of Standards
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 09 March 1981

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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Cited By

Godbole ACheang KManerkar YSeshia STsafrir DMusuvathi MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Lifting Micro-Update Models from RTL for Formal Security AnalysisProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3620665.3640418(631-648)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3620665.3640418
Kim TChoi JHeo KCha SCalandrino JTroncoso C(2023)DAFLProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620513(4931-4948)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620513
Ahad AWang GKim CJana SLin ZKwon YAamodt TSwift MJerger N(2023)FreePart: Hardening Data Processing Software via Framework-based Partitioning and IsolationProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 410.1145/3623278.3624760(169-188)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623278.3624760
Gharachorlu GSumner NJust RFraser G(2023)Type Batched Program ReductionProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3598065(398-410)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597926.3598065
Liyanage DBöhme MTantithamthavorn CLipp SGrundy JPollock LPenta M(2023)Reachable Coverage: Estimating Saturation in FuzzingProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00042(371-383)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
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Zhong ZLiu JWu DDi PSui YLiu ALui JLiu AMuccini H(2023)Scalable Compositional Static Taint Analysis for Sensitive Data Tracing on Industrial Micro-ServicesProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice10.1109/ICSE-SEIP58684.2023.00015(110-121)Online publication date: 17-May-2023
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Crichton WPatrignani MAgrawala MHanrahan PJhala RDillig I(2022)Modular information flow through ownershipProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523445(1-14)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
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Tiwari OJoshi R(2022)Identifying Extract Method RefactoringsProceedings of the 15th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3511430.3511435(1-11)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2022
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Jung CKim DChen AWang WZheng YLee KKwon YDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Hiding critical program components via ambiguous translationProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510139(1120-1132)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
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