Abstract
Dynamic slicing is an analysis that operates on program execution models (e.g., dynamic dependence graphs) to support the interpreation of program-execution traces. Given an execution event of interest (i.e., the slicing criterion), it solves for all instruction-execution events that either affect or are affected by that slicing criterion, and thereby reduces the search space to find influences within execution traces. Unfortunately, the resulting dynamic slices are still often prohibitively large for many uses. Despite this reduction search space, the dynamic slices are often still prohibitively large for many uses, and moreover, are provided without guidance of which and to what degree those influences are exerted. In this work, we present a novel approach to quantify the relevance of each instruction-execution event within a dynamic slice by its degree of relative influence on the slicing criterion. As such, we augment the dynamic slice with dynamic-relevance measures for each event in the slice, which can be used to guide and prioritize inspection of the events in the slice. We conducted an experiment that evaluates the ability of existing dynamic slicing and our approach, using dynamic relevance, to correctly identify sources of execution influence and state propagation. The results of the experiment show that inspections that were guided by traditional dynamic slicing to find the root cause for a failure reduced the search space by, on average, 61.3%. Further, inspections guided with the assistance of the new dynamic relevance reduced the search space by 96.2%.
