Efficient Forward Computation of Dynamic Slices Using Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagr.pdfVIP

Efficient Forward Computation of Dynamic Slices Using Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams Xiangyu Zhang Rajiv Gupta Youtao Zhang The University of Arizona The Univ. of Texas at Dallas Dept. of Computer Science Dept. of Computer Science Tucson, Arizona 85721 Richardson, Texas 75083 Abstract then a great deal of research has been conducted on both al- gorithms and tools for intraprocedural and interprocedural Dynamic slicing algorithms can greatly reduce the de- static slicing [15, 7]. It is widely recognized that for pro- bugging effort by focusing the attention of the user on a rel- grams that make extensive use of pointers, the highly con- evant subset of program statements. Recently algorithms for servative nature of data dependency analysis leads to highly forward computation of dynamic slices have been imprecise and considerably larger slices [7, 18, 13]. For proposed which maintain dynamic slices of all variables as program debugging, where the objective of slicing is to re- the program executes. An advantage of this approach is that duce the debugging effort by focusing the attention of the when a request for a slice is made, it is already available. user on the relevant subset of program statements, conser- The main disadvantage of using such an algorithm for slic- vatively computed