We propose an approach for program slicing of AspectJ software, based on a novel data-flow and control-flow program representation. The representation is built at the source-code level and, unlike previous work, captures the semantic intricacies of various pointcut designators, multiple advices per joint point, dynamic advices, exceptions, and general flow of data to, from, and between advices....

An execution backtracking facility in interactive source debuggers allows users to mirror their thought processes while debugging — working backwards from the location where an error is manifested and determining the conditions under which the error occurred. Such a facility also allows a user to change program characteristics and reexecute from arbitrary points within the program under examina...

The rapidly increasing number of cores available in multicore processors does not necessarily lead directly to a commensurate increase in performance: programs written in conventional languages, such as C, need careful restructuring, preferably automatically, before the benefits can be observed in improved run-times. Even then, much depends upon the intrinsic capacity of the original program fo...

We describe the implementation of Best, a tool for slicing binary code. We aim to integrate this tool in a WCET estimation framework based on model checking. In this approach, program slicing is used to abstract the program model in order to reduce the state space of the system. In this article, we also report on the results of an evaluation of the efficiency of the abstraction technique. 1998 ...

Petri nets provide a means for modelling and verifying the behavior of concurrent systems. Program slicing is a well-known technique in imperative programming for extracting those statements of a program that may affect a given program point. In the context of Petri nets, computing a net slice can be seen as a graph reachability problem. In this paper, we propose two slicing techniques for Petr...

One of the critiques on program slicing is that slices presented to the user are hard to understand. This is partly due to bad user interfaces, but mainly related to the problem that slicing ‘dumps’ the results onto the user without any explanation. This work will present an approach that can be used to ‘filter’ slices. This approach basically introduces ‘barriers’ which are not allowed to be p...

Program Slicing has many applications in software engineering activities. However, until recently, no slicing algorithm has been presented that can compute executable slices for concurrent logic programs. In this paper we present a dependence-graph based approach to computing executable slice for concurrent logic programs. The dependence-based representation used in this paper is called the Arg...

This thesis aims to address a number of program reasoning problems faced every day by programmers, using the technique of symbolic execution. Symbolic execution has the advantage of avoiding "infeasible" paths in the program (paths that cannot be exercised for any input), exploring which could provide spurious information about the program and mislead the programmer. However, as symbolic execut...

Pre-execution uses helper threads running in spare hardware contexts to trigger cache misses in front of the main thread, hence hiding their latency. At the heart of pre-execution is the code that runs in the pre-execution threads themselves. The most common approach is for preexecution threads to run a subset of the instructions executed by the original program, called backward slices [18], wh...

This paper introduces backward conditioning. Like forward conditioning (used in conditioned slicing), backward conditioning consists of specialising a program with respect to a condition inserted into the program. However, whereas forward conditioning deletes statements which are not executed when the initial state satisfies the condition, backward conditioning deletes statements which cannot c...