Program Sclicing in Object-Oriented Languages

A slice of a program with respect to a certain variable value is the smallest subset of this program which still produces the same variable value. Program slicing reduces the size of a program and can be used for reverse engineering and error tracing. We developed new techniques for inter-modular slicing of object-oriented programs based of data flow analyis. Special challenges in these kind of programs are the alias effects introduced by pointers and reference parameters as well as the dynamic binding of messages to methods, which requires one to consider all possible methods that could be invoked by a message. We developed new user guidance techniques to reduce the set of possible target methods. We implemented our techniques in a fully operational program slicer for Oberon programs.