Editing Program slicing (section)

{{Short description|Set of software engineering methods}}
{{other uses of|slicing|Slicing (disambiguation)}}
{{more footnotes|date=August 2012}}

In [[computer programming]], '''program slicing''' is the computation of the set of program statements, the '''program slice''', that may affect the values at some point of interest, referred to as a '''slicing criterion'''. Program slicing can be used in [[debugging]] to locate source of errors more easily. Other applications of slicing include [[software maintenance]], [[Optimization (computer science)|optimization]], [[Program analysis (computer science)|program analysis]], and [[Non-interference (security)|information flow control]].

Slicing techniques have been seeing a rapid development since the original definition by [[Mark Weiser]]. At first, slicing was only static, i.e., applied on the source code with no other information than the source code. [[Bogdan Korel]] and [[Janusz Laski]] introduced ''dynamic slicing'', which works on a specific execution of the program (for a given execution trace).<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Korel |first1=Bogdan |last2=Laski |first2=Janusz |title=Dynamic Program Slicing |journal=Information Processing Letters |date=1988 |volume=29 |issue=3 |pages=155–163 |doi=10.1016/0020-0190(88)90054-3 |citeseerx=10.1.1.158.9078 }}</ref> Other forms of slicing exist, for instance path slicing.<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Jhala|first1=Ranjit|last2=Majumdar|first2=Rupak|title=Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation |chapter=Path slicing |date=2005|series=PLDI '05|location=New York, NY, USA|publisher=ACM|pages=38–47|doi=10.1145/1065010.1065016|isbn=9781595930569|s2cid=5065847 }}</ref>