Slicing aspect-oriented software

Abstract

Program slicing has many applications in software engineering activities including program comprehension, debugging, testing, maintenance, and model checking. In this paper, we propose an approach to slicing aspect-oriented software. To solve this problem, we present a dependence-based representation called aspect-oriented system dependence graph (ASDG), which extends previous dependence graphs, to represent aspect-oriented software. The ASDG of an aspect-oriented program consists of three parts: a system dependence graph for non-aspect code, a group of dependence graphs for aspect code, and some additional dependence arcs used to connect the system dependence graph to the dependence graphs for aspect code. After that, we show how to compute a static slice of an aspect-oriented program based on the ASDG.