Slicing of Programs Dynamically under Distributed Environment

Abstract

A dynamic program slice is the part of a program that affects the computation of a variable of interest during program execution on a specific program input. Dynamic slices are usually smaller than static slices and are more useful in interactive applications such as program debugging and testing. The understanding and debugging of multithreaded and distributed programs are much harder compared to those of sequential programs. The nondeterministic nature of multithreaded programs, the lack of global states, unsynchronized interactions among processes, multiple threads of control and a dynamically varying number of processes are some of the reasons for this difficulty.

Different types of dynamic program slices, together with algorithms to compute them have been proposed in the literature. Most of the existing algorithms for finding slices of distributed programs use trace files and are not efficient in terms of time and space complexity. Some existing algorithms use a dependency graph and traverse the graph when the slices are asked for, resulting in high response time. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm for distributed programs. It uses control dependence graph as an intermediate representation and generates the dynamic slices with fast response time.