Computing super reduced program slices by composing slicing techniques

Abstract

Program slicing is a technique to extract the part of a program (the slice) that influences or is influenced by a set of variables at a given point. Computing minimal slices is undecidable in the general case, and obtaining the minimal slice of a given program is computationally prohibitive even for very small programs. Hence, no matter what program sheer we use, in general, we cannot be sure that our slices are minimal. In this work, we present a method to automatically produce a new notion of slice that we call super reduced slice because it is constructed with the combination of different slicing techniques, including the composition of standard program sheers.