A slicing method for object-oriented programs using lightweight dynamic information

Abstract

Program slicing has been used for efficient program debugging activities. A program slice is computed by analyzing dependence relations between program statements. We can divide dependence analyses into two categories, static and dynamic; the former requires small analysis costs, but the resulting slices are large, and in the latter the cost is high but the slices are small. In this paper, we propose a program slicing method for object-oriented programs and evaluate its effectiveness with Java programs. Since object-oriented languages have many dynamically determined elements, static analysis could not compute practical analysis results. Our method uses static and dynamic analyses appropriately and computes accurate slices with small costs.