Software comprehension and program slicing

Program comprehension is a very difficult task but, at the same time crucial for system maintenance and development. As programs grow in size, this task becomes more and more daunting. It is, therefore, necessary to evolve program comprehension strategies, which allow us to minimize the amount of data that is to be observed and inspected as part of the comprehension process. Program slicing has been widely accepted as a very powerful technique for programmers to comprehend very large and complex programs. This technique decomposes a large program into a smaller one that contains only statements relevant to the computation of a selected function and variable. Various slicing techniques have been evolved over the past years, such as static slicing, dynamic slicing and hybrid slicing. Each technique exploits a different algorithm to compute slices based on some slicing criterion. In this report, we present an alternate approach to hybrid slicing and its integration in the CONCEPT (C[barbelow]omprehension O[barbelow]f N[barbelow]et CE ntered P[barbelow]rograms and T[barbelow]echniques) project, which provides a set of tools and techniques to slice a program using various slicing approaches/methodologies. CONCEPT also utilizes information derived from program slicing algorithms to derive a program comprehension framework.