Reuse-driven interprocedural slicing in the presence of pointers and recursion

Abstract

Program slicing, a technique to compute the subset of program statements that can affect the value of a program variable at a specific program point, is widely used in tools to support maintenance activities. To be useful for supporting these activities, a slicing technique must be sufficiently precise and efficient. Harrold and Ci (1998) proposed a method for improving the efficiency of slicing by reusing slicing information for subsequent slicing. This paper presents an interprocedural slicing algorithm that improves the efficiency and precision of Harrold and Ci's algorithm for programs with pointer variables and recursion. Our empirical results show that our improvements can effectively achieve more reuse in slice computation, for programs with pointers, and can significantly reduce the sizes of slices, for programs with recursion.