In this paper we give a brief introduction to the foundations of WSL transformation theory and describe how the concept of program slicing can be formalised in the theory. This formalism naturally lends itself to several generalisations including amorphous slicing and conditioned slicing. One novel generalisation is “semantic slicing” which combines slicing and abstraction to a specification. I...

slice provides additional information: it says for each statement in the slice if the condition c =‘\n’ will be satisfied or not. (1) read(text); [false] (2) read(n); [false] (3) lines = 1; [c!=‘\n’] (4) chars = 1; [false] (5) subtext = ""; [false] (6) c = getChar(text); [false] (7) while (c != ‘\eof’) [false] (8) if (c == ‘\n’) [false] (9) then lines = lines + 1; [false] (10) chars = chars + 1...

Slicing is the activity of reducing a program or a specification with respect to a given condition (the slicing criterion) such that the condition holds on the full program if and only if it holds on the reduced program. Originating from program analysis the entity to be sliced is usually a program and the slicing criterion a value of a variable at a certain program point. In this paper we pres...

Program slicing is the process of deleting statements in a program that do not affect a given set of variables at a chosen point in the program. In this paper the parallel slicing algorithm is introduced. It is shown how the control flow graph of the program to be sliced is converted into a network of concurrent processes, thereby producing a parallel version of Weiser’s original static slicing...

This study explores the relationship between program slices and faults. The aim is to investigate whether the characteristics of program slices can be used to identify faultprone software components. Slicing metrics and dependence clusters are used to characterise the slicing profile of a software component, then the relationship between the slicing profile of the component and the faults in th...

By now, the concept of program slicing has been known in the research community for around 25 years. As a research topic, it has enjoyed a fair share of popularity, evidenced by the number of articles published on the topic following Mark Weiser’s seminal paper. However, outside research circles, program slicing appears to be virtually unknown. In this report, we take the premise that program s...

In this paper we give a brief introduction to the foundations of WSL transformation theory and describe some applications to program slicing. We introduce some generalisations of traditional slicing, amorphous slicing and conditioned slicing which are possible in the framework of WSL transformations. One generalisation is “semantic slicing” which combines slicing and abstraction to a specificat...

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Ensuring correctness of software by formal methods is a very relevant and widely studied problem. Automatic verification of software using model checking suffers from the state space explosion problem. Abstraction is emerging as the key candidate for making the model checking problem tractable, and a large body of research exists on abstraction based verification. Many useful abstractions are p...

We present point slicing, a new slicing technique for imperative programs that gives an answer to the question Which sentences can be executed if sentence p is executed?, very common in program testing, debugging, and understanding tasks and, as far as we know, not directly addressed by other slicing techniques. Point slicing uses a program point as criterion and computes slices by deleting sen...