Locating faulty code by multiple points slicing

Dynamic slicing has long been considered as a useful tool for debugging programs as it effectively identifies a reduced fault candidate set which captures the faulty code in the program. Traditionally, a backward dynamic slice is computed starting from an incorrect value observed by the programmer during a failed program run. This incorrect value is either an incorrect output value or an incorrect address whose dereferencing causes the program to crash. Recently we proposed two additional types of dynamic slices, a forward dynamic slice of a minimal failure inducing input difference and a bidirectional dynamic slice of a critical predicate. We have built a dynamic slicing tool that computes dynamic slices by instrumenting program binaries and executing them to build dynamic dependence graphs. In this paper, through experiments, we demonstrate that supporting three different types of dynamic slices has the following advantages. First, we observe that for each type of dynamic slice there are distinct situations in which it is not applicable. Therefore, we should support multiple types of slices to handle a wide range of situations. Second, supporting multiple types of dynamic slices enables us to compute a multiple points dynamic slice which is the intersection of different type of available slices. Our experiments show that multiple points dynamic slices are significantly smaller than any of the three kinds of individual dynamic slices. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.