A Novel Approach for Computing Dynamic Slices of Web Based Applications

Program slicing is an effective decomposition technique to relevant parts of a program or application during debugging and analysis activities. It extracts slice of codes from a developed program, which have been affected by value of variable for some point of interest. A variant of slicing, dynamic slicing based on specific execution when debugged, yeilds more precise executable slices. Moreover, the dynamic slicing obtained for web application is useful in analysis and testing of web sites. In this paper we have proposed an algorithm for computing dynamic slices of web based applications. We have used a dependence based intermediate program representation, which is named as Web Application Dependency Graph (WADG) for representing a web based application embedded with a scripting language. The WADG is a directed digraph which represents the various types of dependencies like data, control and link that may exists between different statements of web application. After user entered details, our proposed algorithm computes slice by marking and unmarking the executed edges of WADG appropriately.