A State-Based Model Slicing: A Survey

Program slicing is a source code analysis and manipulation technique, in which a subprogram is identified based on a user-specified slicing criterion. The criterion captures the point of interest within the program, while the process of slicing consists of following dependencies to locate those parts of the program that may affect the slicing criterion [Weiser 1979]. Some flavours of slicing merely highlight the identified subprogram within the larger program, while others actively rewrite the program based upon the identified subprogram. As an increasing portion of software production is done with models – particularly specification and design – researchers have moved from considering only program slicing to model slicing. The need for model slicing is strong: models convey many types of information better than programs, but become unwieldy in scale far quicker. Software modelling encompasses a number of different languages, with UML – the de facto standard modelling language – containing several distinct sub-languages. Each different modelling language needs to be considered differently, with the challenges facing class models (describing static structure) being different than object