A Novel Approach of Dynamic Slicing and Debugging of Object Oriented Programs

Abstract

Software testing and debugging is the necessary phase of software development, lots of effort has been deployed to detect the bugs and debug the program. Program slicing is a technique to extract program parts with respect to some special computation. Program Slicing is to remove the irrelevant statements from the program code. Irrelevant statements are those statements to which the buggy statement is neither data dependent nor control dependent. Program slicing aids the programmer to reduce the debugging effort. Computation of slices needs an intermediate representation of the program, and then this intermediate representation is used to compute the slices. Various dependence graphs have been proposed to represent the program like program dependence graph. Since these graphs are very complex it is very difficult to convert the program into these intermediate graphs. The proposed approach introduces another intermediate representation of the programs whose space complexity is lesser. Detecting and locating bugs is the major task of the debugging process. Here we detect most possible bugs in the program with polymorphic behavior. The debugger also generates the suggestion messages for the detected bugs. These suggestion messages can help the programmer in debugging the program.