Dynamic slicing of parallel message-passing programs

As software applications grow larger and more complex, program maintenance activities such as adding new functionality, debugging and testing consume an increasing amount of available resources for software development. This is especially true for distributed systems communicating via message-passing. In order to cope with this increased complexity, programmers need effective computer-supported methods for decomposition and dependence analysis of programs, to understand dependencies between different parts of software systems and to find the sources of errors. Program slicing is one method for such decomposition and dependence analysis. A program slice with respect to a specified variable at some program point consists of those parts of the program which may directly or indirectly affect the value of that variable at the particular program point. In this paper, we present an algorithm for dynamic slicing of distributed/parallel programs and some results from an implementation for a parallel MIMD computer