A Graph Coloring Approach to Dynamic Slicing of Object-Oriented Programs

Abstract

Program slicing is a decomposition technique, which produces a subprogram from the parent program relevant to a particular computation. Hence slicing is also regarded
as a program transformation technique. A dynamic program slice is an executable part of a program whose behavior is identical, for the same program input, to that of the
original program with respect to a variable of interest at some execution position. Dynamic slices are smaller than static slice, which can be used eciently in dierent
software engineering activities like program testing, debugging, software maintenance, program comprehension etc.
In this dissertation, we present our work concerned with the dynamic slicing of object-oriented programs. We have developed a novel algorithm, which incorporates graph coloring technique to compute dynamic slice of object-oriented programs. But in order to achieve the goal efficiently, we have contradicted the constraints of the
traditional graph coloring theory. Moreover, the state restriction of the slicing criterion is taken into consideration, in addition to the dependence analysis. The advantage of our algorithm is that, it is more time ecient than the existing algorithms. We have named this algorithm, as Contradictory Graph Coloring Algorithm (CGCA).