Slicing of Java Programs using the Soot Framework

Slicing is a technique used to identify the program subset that could affect a particular statement of interest called the slicing criterion. Slicing has applications in program understanding, testing, model checking and functionality extraction. For computing a slice, we need to compute dependence information among statements. In object oriented languages, finding dependence information becomes non-trivial because of language features like inheritance, objects, polymorphism, dynamic binding and so forth. We develop a method for computing slices in object oriented programs for application in regression testing. In particular we propose a new method for intraprocedural alias analysis for Java and implement an interprocedural slicing technique using the system dependence graph of Horwitz et al.