A Very Efficient and Scalable Forward Static Slicing Approach

A highly efficient lightweight forward static slicing method is introduced. The method is implemented as a tool on top of srcML, an XML representation of source code. The approach does not compute the program dependence graph but instead dependency information is computed as needed while computing the slice on a variable. The result is a list of line numbers, dependent variables, aliases, and function calls that are part of the slice for a given variable. The tool produces the slice in this manner for all variables in a given system. The approach is highly scalable and can generate the slices for all variables of the Linux kernel in less than 13 minutes. Benchmark results are compared with the Code Surfer slicing tool and the approach compares well with regards to accuracy of slices.