Design and implementation of bytecode-based Java slicing system

A program slice is a set of statements that affect the value of a variable v in a statement s. In order to calculate a program slice, we must know the dependence relations between statements in the program. Program slicing techniques are roughly divided into two categories, static slicing and dynamic slicing, and we have proposed DC slicing technique which uses both static and dynamic information. We propose a method of constructing a DC slicing system for Java programs. Java programs have many elements which are dynamically determined at the time of execution, so the DC slicing technique is effective in the analysis of Java programs. To construct the system, we have extended a Java virtual machine for extraction of dynamic information. We have applied the system to several sample programs to evaluate our approach.