Computing Dynamic Slices of Feature--Oriented Programs Using Execution Trace File

Abstract

Feature-Oriented Programming (FOP) is a general paradigm for synthesizing programs in software product lines. A family of software systems constitutes a software product line (SPL). The unique characteristics of feature-oriented programs such as mixin layers, refinements of classes, refinements of constructors, constants, refinements, etc. pose special difficulties in the slicing of these programs. This paper proposes a dynamic slicing algorithm for feature-oriented programs. The algorithm is named Execution Trace File Based Feature-Oriented Dynamic Slicing (ETBFODS) algorithm. The ETBFODS algorithm uses a dependence based representation called Dynamic Feature Composition Dependence Graph (DFCDG) and an execution trace file to store execution history of the program for a given input. The dynamic slice is computed by traversing the DFCDG in breadth--first or depth-first wise and then mapping the resultant traversed vertices to the program statements.