Study of current program slicing techniques

Since Mark Weiser defined program slicing first time in his Ph.D thesis in 1979, number of papers have been presented in this area. Program slicing is a well known program analysis technique that extracts the elements of a program related to a particular computation. A large number of various program slicing variants have been studied and algorithms have been implemented to compute slice. This paper surveys work undertaken in the field of slicing, the different techniques for different programming paradigms such as object oriented, component based, web applications etc. Many researchers have extended it in many directions and for all programming paradigms that include program debugging, program analysis, program integration, software maintenance, testing, program understanding, reengineering, reverse engineering.