ConSIT: A Conditioned Program Slicer

Conditioned slicing is a powerful generalisation of static and dynamic slicing which has applications to many problems in software maintenance and evolution, including re-use, reengineering and program comprehension. However, there has been relatively little work on the implementation of conditioned slicing. Algorithms for implementing conditioned slicing necessarily involve reasoning about the values of program predicates in certain sets of states derived from the conditioned slicing criterion, making implementation particularly demanding. This paper introduces ConSIT, a conditional slicing system which is based upon conventional static slicing, symbolic execution and theorem proving. ConSIT is the first fully automated implementation of conditioned slicing. An implementation of ConSIT is available for experimentation at http://www.mcs.gold.ac.uk/ ̃mas01sd/ consit.html.