How Accurate Is Dynamic Program Slicing? An Empirical Approach to Compute Accuracy Bounds

Abstract

Dynamic program slicing attempts to find runtime dependencies among statements to support security, reliability, and quality tasks such as information-flow analysis, testing, and debugging. However, it is not known how accurately dynamic slices identify statements that really affect each other. We propose a new approach to estimate the accuracy of dynamic slices. We use this approach to obtain bounds on the accuracy of multiple dynamic slices in Java software. Early results suggest that dynamic slices suffer from some imprecision and, more critically, can have a low recall whose upper bound we estimate to be 60% on average.