Development and evaluation of a slicing-based C++ debugger

The main objective of this work was to develop a debugging tool for C++ programs called C++Debug that uses program slicing and dicing techniques. The incremental development started by including simple statements first and then adding pointers, structures, functions, and classes. In order for C++Debug to be more powerful, dynamic slicing rather than static slicing was chosen. The work included new algorithms that handle class, function, and pointer in C++. In this paper, the overall architecture of C++Debug is presented and an overview of the algorithms devised for the debugger is discussed. The limitations of the tool are also listed and the results of a small-scale evaluation of the debugger is reported.