Hierarchical dynamic slicing

Abstract

Dynamic slicing is a widely used technique for program analysis, debugging, and comprehension. However, the reported slice is often too large to be inspected by the programmer. In this work, we address this deficiency by hierarchically applying dynamic slicing at various levels of granularity. The basic observation is to divide a program execution trace into "phases", with data/control dependencies inside each phase being suppressed. Only the inter-phase dependencies are presented to the programmer. The programmer then zooms into one of these phases which is further divided into sub-phases and analyzed. We also discuss how our ideas can be used to augment debugging methods other then slicing (such as "fault localization", a recently proposed trace comparison method for software debugging).