AN APPROACH TO ANALYZING AND UNDERSTANDING PROGRAM──PROGRAM SLICING

Program slicing is a static analysis technique that extracts all statements relevant to the computation of a given variable. Program slicing is useful in program debugging, software maintenance, and program understanding. Program slices can be used to reduce the effort in examining software by allowing a software auditor to focus attention on one computation at a time. In this paper, the research and development of program slicing is discussed, all kinds of program slicing methods are compared, the progress made in object-oriented program slicing domain is also presented, and current problem and future directions are analyzed at the end of the paper.