Program Slicing in the Presence of Preprocessor Variability

Program slicing is a common means to support developers in examining the source code with respect to debugging, program comprehension, or regression testing. While a vast amount of techniques exist, they are mostly tailored to single software systems. However, with the increasing importance of variable and highly-configurable systems, such as the Linux kernel, the number of software variants, subject to analysis, increases dramatically. Consequently, it is infeasible to apply slicing on each variant in isolation. To overcome this problem, we propose variability-aware slicing, a technique that can deal with source code variability, specifically conditional compilation as introduced by the C preprocessor. Particularly, we provide details of our variability-aware dependence analysis for program slicing, point out benefits of our slicing technique, and mention current limitations and future work.