Article

Thin slicing

Authors:

Manu Sridharan,

Stephen J. Fink,

Rastislav BodikAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 112 - 122

https://doi.org/10.1145/1250734.1250748

Published: 10 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Program slicing systematically identifies parts of a program relevant to a seed statement. Unfortunately, slices of modern programs often grow too large for human consumption. We argue that unwieldy slices arise primarily from an overly broad definition of relevance, rather than from analysis imprecision. While a traditional slice includes all statements that may affect a point of interest, not all such statements appear equally relevant to a human.

As an improved method of finding relevant statements, we propose thin slicing. A thin slice consists only of producer statements for the seed, i.e., those statements that help compute and copy avalue to the seed. Statements that explain why producers affect the seed are excluded. For example, for a seed that reads a value from a container object, a thin slice includes statements that store the value into the container, but excludes statements that manipulate pointers to the container itself. Thin slices can also be hierarchically expanded to include statements explaining how producers affect the seed, yielding a traditional slice in the limit.

We evaluated thin slicing for a set of debugging and program understanding tasks. The evaluation showed that thin slices usually included the desired statements for the tasks (e.g., the buggy statement for a debugging task). Furthermore, in simulated use of a slicing tool, thin slices revealed desired statements after inspecting 3.3 times fewer statements than traditional slicing for our debugging tasks and 9.4 times fewer statements for our program understanding tasks. Finally, our thin slicing algorithm scales well to relatively large Java benchmarks, suggesting that thin slicing represents an attractive option for practical tools.

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Index Terms

Thin slicing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2007

508 pages

ISBN:9781595936332

DOI:10.1145/1250734

General Chair:
Jeanne Ferrante
University of California, San Diego, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathryn S. McKinley
University of Texas at Austin, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 6
Proceedings of the 2007 PLDI conference
June 2007
491 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1273442
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 10 June 2007

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PLDI '07

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PLDI '07: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 10 - 13, 2007

California, San Diego, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 406 of 2,067 submissions, 20%

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Paiva JLeal JFigueira Á(2024)Comparing semantic graph representations of source code: The case of automatic feedback on programming assignmentsComputer Science and Information Systems10.2298/CSIS230615004P21:1(117-142)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS230615004P
Badihi SNourji SRubin JFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)Slicer4D: A Slicing-based Debugger for JavaProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695363(2407-2410)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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