Dynamic slicing of Java bytecode programs

Abstract

A forward global method for obtaining backward dynamic slices of Java bytecode programs is presented. In contrast with existing published techniques that require either a customized Java compiler (which also implies access to the source code) or bytecode instrumentation and eventual manual dependency specifications, our approach was to produce an instrumented virtual machine for Java. This approach works with programs compiled with arbitrary third party compilers and does not require access to the source code during the slicing process. However, we still retain the ability to express the slicing criterion and the resulting slice in terms of source code locations using the supplemental information present in the compiled code. Our technique also handles advanced aspects of the Java environment, such as exception handling, multithreaded execution and, to a certain degree, the execution of native machine code linked with the Java classes.