Hierarchical Slicing Object-Oriented Programs for Debugging

Hierarchical program slicing which is stratified calculated based on the inherent level characteristics of object- oriented programs is an effective technique for narrowing the errors to the relevant parts of a program and improving the efficiency when debugging. Given a hierarchical slicing criterion, the hierarchical slice contains only those packages, classes, methods and statements that actually affect the variables in the slicing criterion. This paper proposes a method step by step to narrow the scope of object-oriented program based on hierarchical slicing. It is well acknowledge that software testing is an important part of software developing and software engineering. Software testing plays a key role in error checking, correction, prevention and software quality assurance. With the improvement of software size and complexity, using the traditional software testing techniques to error checking and fault localization are also getting more and more difficult. Program Slicing, as presented by Mark Weiser (1) is an effective technique for narrowing the focus of attention to the relevant parts of a program, which decomposed programs by analyzing their data flow and control flow (2). Given a program point s and the variable set V, denoted by , is called a slicing criterion. Testing on the base of program slicing is to remove irrelevant statements from source codes according to slicing criterion while preserving the behavior of its original program, making the debugging can be attention to the relevant code to achieve the purpose of rapid fault localization.