Dynamic program slicing in understanding of program execution

A dynamic program slice is an executable part of a program whose behavior is identical, for the same program input, to that of an original program with respect to a variable(s) of interest at some execution position. In the existing dynamic slicing tools, dynamic slices are represented in the textual form, i.e., a dynamic slice is displayed to programmers as a subprogram or as highlighted statements in the original program. Although dynamic slicing does narrow the size of the program, the textual representation of a dynamic slice does not provide much guidance in the understanding of program execution. During dynamic slice computation different types of information are computed and then discarded. In this paper we propose new dynamic-slicing related features that exploit this information for the purpose of understanding program execution. These features were implemented in the dynamic slicing tool that is used to improve the process of program understanding.