GammaPolarSlicer

Abstract

In software development, it is often desirable to reuse existing software components. This has been recognized since 1968, when Douglas Mcllroy of Bell Laboratories proposed basing the software industry on reuse. Despite the failures in practice, many efforts have been made to make this idea successful. In this context, we address the problem of reusing annotated components as a rigorous way of assuring the quality of the application under construction. We introduce the concept of caller-based slicing as a way to certify that the integration of an annotated component with a contract into a legacy system will preserve the behavior of the former. To complement the efforts done and the benefits of the slicing techniques, there is also a need to find an efficient way to visualize the annotated components and their slices. To take full profit of visualization, it is crucial to combine the visualization of the control/data flow with the textual representation of source code. To attain this objective,we extend the notion of System Dependence Graph and slicing criterion.