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A Survey of Program Slicing Techniques
- JOURNAL OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
, 1995
"... A program slice consists of the parts of a program that (potentially) affect the values computed at some point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. The task of computing program slices is called program slicing. The original definition of a program slice was presented by Weiser in 197 ..."
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Cited by 790 (10 self)
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A program slice consists of the parts of a program that (potentially) affect the values computed at some point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. The task of computing program slices is called program slicing. The original definition of a program slice was presented by Weiser in 1979. Since then, various slightly different notions of program slices have been proposed, as well as a number of methods to compute them. An important distinction is that between a static and a dynamic slice. The former notion is computed without making assumptions regarding a program's input, whereas the latter relies on some specific test case. Procedures, arbitrary control flow, composite datatypes and pointers, and interprocess communication each require a specific solution. We classify static and dynamic slicing methods for each of these features, and compare their accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, the possibilities for combining solutions for different features are investigated....
Precise Dynamic Slicing Algorithms
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
, 2003
"... Dynamic slicing algorithms can greatly reduce the de-bugging effort by focusing the attention of the user on a rele-vant subset of program statements. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of three precise dynamic slicing algorithms called the full preprocessing (FP), no prepro-cessing ..."
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Cited by 95 (13 self)
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Dynamic slicing algorithms can greatly reduce the de-bugging effort by focusing the attention of the user on a rele-vant subset of program statements. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of three precise dynamic slicing algorithms called the full preprocessing (FP), no prepro-cessing (NP) and limited preprocessing (LP) algorithms. The algorithms differ in the relative timing of construct-ing the dynamic data dependence graph and its traversal for computing requested dynamic slices. Our experiments show that the LP algorithm is a fast and practical precise slicing algorithm. In fact we show that while precise slices can be orders of magnitude smaller than imprecise dynamic slices, for small number of slicing requests, the LP algo-rithm is faster than an imprecise dynamic slicing algorithm proposed by Agrawal and Horgan.
Dynamic binary analysis and instrumentation
, 2004
"... Dynamic binary analysis (DBA) tools such as profilers and checkers help programmers create better software. Dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) frameworks make it easy to build new DBA tools. This dissertation advances the theory and practice of dynamic binary analysis and instrumentation, with an ..."
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Cited by 73 (4 self)
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Dynamic binary analysis (DBA) tools such as profilers and checkers help programmers create better software. Dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) frameworks make it easy to build new DBA tools. This dissertation advances the theory and practice of dynamic binary analysis and instrumentation, with an emphasis on the importance of the use and support of metadata. The dissertation has three main parts. The first part describes a DBI framework called Valgrind which provides novel features to support heavyweight DBA tools that maintain rich metadata, especially location metadata— the shadowing of every register and memory location with a metavalue. Location metadata is used in shadow computation, a kind of DBA where every normal operation is shadowed by an abstract operation. The second part describes three powerful DBA tools. The first tool performs detailed cache profiling. The second tool does an old kind of dynamic analysis—bounds-checking—in a new way. The third tool produces dynamic data flow graphs, a novel visualisation that cuts
Locating faulty code using failure-inducing chops
- In 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2005
, 2005
"... Software debugging is the process of locating and correcting faulty code. Prior techniques to locate faulty code either use program analysis techniques such as backward dynamic program slicing or exclusively use delta debugging to analyze the state changes during program execution. In this paper, we ..."
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Cited by 73 (11 self)
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Software debugging is the process of locating and correcting faulty code. Prior techniques to locate faulty code either use program analysis techniques such as backward dynamic program slicing or exclusively use delta debugging to analyze the state changes during program execution. In this paper, we present a new approach that integrates the potential of delta debugging algorithm with the benefit of forward and backward dynamic program slicing to narrow down the search for faulty code. Our approach is to use delta debugging algorithm to identify a minimal failure-inducing input, use this input to compute a forward dynamic slice and then intersect the statements in this forward dynamic slice with the statements in the backward dynamic slice of the erroneous output to compute a failure-inducing chop. We implemented our technique and conducted experiments with faulty versions of several programs from the Siemens suite to evaluate our technique. Our experiments show that failure-inducing chops can greatly reduce the size of search space compared to the dynamic slices without significantly compromising the capability to locate the faulty code. We also applied our technique to several programs with known memory related bugs such as buffer overflow bugs. The failure-inducing chop in several of these cases contained only 2 to 4 statements which included the code causing memory corruption.
SherLog: Error Diagnosis by Connecting Clues from Run-time Logs
"... Computer systems often fail due to many factors such as software bugs or administrator errors. Diagnosing such production run failures is an important but challenging task since it is difficult to reproduce them in house due to various reasons: (1) unavailability of users ’ inputs and file content d ..."
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Cited by 63 (8 self)
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Computer systems often fail due to many factors such as software bugs or administrator errors. Diagnosing such production run failures is an important but challenging task since it is difficult to reproduce them in house due to various reasons: (1) unavailability of users ’ inputs and file content due to privacy concerns; (2) difficulty in building the exact same execution environment; and (3) non-determinism of concurrent executions on multi-processors. Therefore, programmers often have to diagnose a production run failure based on logs collected back from customers and the corresponding source code. Such diagnosis requires expert knowledge and is also too time-consuming, tedious to narrow down root causes. To address this problem, we propose a tool, called Sher-Log, that analyzes source code by leveraging information provided by run-time logs to infer what must or may have happened during the failed production run. It requires neither re-execution of the program nor knowledge on the log’s semantics. It infers both control and data value information regarding to the failed execution. We evaluate SherLog with 8 representative real world software failures (6 software bugs and 2 configuration errors) from 7 applications including 3 servers. Information inferred by SherLog are very useful for programmers to diagnose these evaluated failures. Our results also show that SherLog can analyze large server applications such as Apache with thousands of logging messages within only 40 minutes.
An Efficient Relevant Slicing Method for Debugging
, 1999
"... Dynamic program slicing methods are widely used for debugging, because many statements can be ignored in the process of localizing a bug. A dynamic program slice wrt a variable contains only those statements that actually had an influence on this variable. However, during debugging we also need to i ..."
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Cited by 57 (4 self)
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Dynamic program slicing methods are widely used for debugging, because many statements can be ignored in the process of localizing a bug. A dynamic program slice wrt a variable contains only those statements that actually had an influence on this variable. However, during debugging we also need to identify those statements that actually did not affect the variable but could have affected it had they been evaluated differently. A relevant slice includes these potentially affecting statements as well, therefore it is appropriate for debugging. In this paper a forward algorithm is introduced for the computation of relevant slices of programs. The space requirement of this method does not depend on the number of different dynamic slices nor on the size of the execution history, hence it can be applied for real size applications. Keywords Dynamic slicing, relevant slicing, debugging 1 INTRODUCTION Program slicing methods are widely used for debugging, testing, reverse engineering and mai...
Program Slicing: Methods and Applications
, 2001
"... Program slicing is a viable method to restrict the focus of a task to specific sub-components of a program. Examples of applications include debugging, testing, program comprehension, restructuring, downsizing, and parallelization. This paper discusses different statement deletion based slicing meth ..."
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Cited by 52 (0 self)
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Program slicing is a viable method to restrict the focus of a task to specific sub-components of a program. Examples of applications include debugging, testing, program comprehension, restructuring, downsizing, and parallelization. This paper discusses different statement deletion based slicing methods, together with algorithms and applications to software engineering.
HDD: hierarchical delta debugging,”
- in International Conference on Software Engineering,
, 2006
"... ABSTRACT Inputs causing a program to fail are usually large and often contain information irrelevant to the failure. It thus helps debugging to simplify program inputs. The Delta Debugging algorithm is a general technique applicable to minimizing all failure-inducing inputs for more effective debug ..."
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Cited by 49 (0 self)
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ABSTRACT Inputs causing a program to fail are usually large and often contain information irrelevant to the failure. It thus helps debugging to simplify program inputs. The Delta Debugging algorithm is a general technique applicable to minimizing all failure-inducing inputs for more effective debugging. In this paper, we present HDD, a simple but effective algorithm that significantly speeds up Delta Debugging and increases its output quality on tree structured inputs such as XML. Instead of treating the inputs as one flat atomic list, we apply Delta Debugging to the very structure of the data. In particular, we apply the original Delta Debugging algorithm to each level of a program's input, working from the coarsest to the finest levels. We are thus able to prune the large irrelevant portions of the input early. All the generated input configurations are syntactically valid, reducing the number of inconclusive configurations that need to be tested and accordingly the amount of time spent simplifying. We have implemented HDD and evaluated it on a number of real failure-inducing inputs from the GCC and Mozilla bugzilla databases. Our Hierarchical Delta Debugging algorithm produces simpler outputs and takes orders of magnitude fewer test cases than the original Delta Debugging algorithm. It is able to scale to inputs of considerable size that the original Delta Debugging algorithm cannot process in practice. We argue that HDD is an effective tool for automatic debugging of programs expecting structured inputs.
Gemund. On the accuracy of spectrumbased fault localization
- In Proceedings of TAIC PART
, 2007
"... c○2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or ..."
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Cited by 43 (9 self)
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c○2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or
Applying Slicing Technique to Software Architectures
- Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems
, 1998
"... Software architecture is receiving increasingly attention as a critical design level for software systems. As software architecture design resources (in the form of architectural specifications) are going to be accumulated, the development of techniques and tools to support architectural understandi ..."
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Cited by 33 (6 self)
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Software architecture is receiving increasingly attention as a critical design level for software systems. As software architecture design resources (in the form of architectural specifications) are going to be accumulated, the development of techniques and tools to support architectural understanding, testing, reengineering, maintenance, and reuse will become an important issue. This paper introduces a new form of slicing, named architectural slicing, to aid architectural understanding and reuse. In contrast to traditional slicing, architectural slicing is designed to operate on the architectural specification of a software system, rather than the source code of a program. Architectural slicing provides knowledge about the high-level structure of a software system, rather than the low-level implementation details of a program. In order to compute an architectural slice, we present the architecture information flow graph which can be used to represent information flows in a software architecture. Based on the graph, we give a two-phase algorithm to compute an architectural slice. 1
