Static Slicing of Interprocedural Programs

Abstract

Program slicing has many applications in a software development environment such as debugging, testing, anomaly detection, program understanding and many more. The concept being introduced by Weiser and it was started with static slicing calculation. Talking about static slicing, it is a subset of statements of a program which directly or indirectly affect the values of the variables computed providing a slicing criterion. In this project, we have developed an approach for creating an intermediate representation of a program in the form of System Dependence Graph (SDG) which is to be, again taken as input for computing the slicing of a program with respect to slicing criterion. The slicing approach computes the slices with respect to a given slicing criterion. For generating the graph, we have analysed the input program, identified the tokens and finally generated the relation between tokens as data dependent or control dependent. For calculating the slice, we have used two-phase graph reachability algorithm developed by Horwitz, Reps and Binkley, which creates a graph consisting of only those nodes that are dependent on slicing criterion. Finally we have plotted a graph between time taken to create graph versus number of functions used in program. Our approach of calculating slices has been limited only to C programs.