Conditioned program slicing

Slicing is a technique to decompose programs based on the analysis of the control and data flow. In the original Weiser's definition, a slice consists of any subset of program statements preserving the behaviour of the original program with respect to a program point and a subset of the program variables (slicing criterion), for any execution path. We present conditioned slicing, a general slicing model based on statement deletion. A conditioned slice consists of a subset of program statements which preserves the behaviour of the original program with respect to a slicing criterion for a given set of execution paths. The set of initial states of the program that characterise these paths is specified in the form of a first order logic formula on the input variables. We also show how slices deriving from other statement deletion based slicing models can be defined as conditioned slices. This is used to formally define a partial ordering relation between slicing models and to build a classification framework. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.