Program slicing

Abstract

Program slicing provides a new way to software maintenance, program understanding. It can give the programmer the statements only relevant to the computation of a given function. It can transform a large program into a smaller one. A program slicing respected with a point of interest is not only relevant on the variables which are defined or used by the interesting point, but also relevant on the statements and predicates which are effected by these variables and which are effecting these variables too. In this paper, we elaborate on the program slicing technology research and progress. We introduce several different sorts of program slicing, slicing criterion and slicing algorithm. The algorithm based on data flaw equations and the one base dependence graph are discussed. The difference between the intra-procedure slicing and the inter-procedure slicing is described. © 2010 IEEE.