Colloquium Speaker

Speaker:	D.M. Dhamdhere Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Topic:	An Effective Execution History For Dynamic Slicing
Date:	Monday, July 30, 2001
Time:	2:00 PM
Place:	Gould-Simpson, Room 701

ABSTRACT

An execution history contains information concerning dynamic behaviour of a program. This information is used for constructing a dynamic slice of a program. Execution histories tend to be very large in size, hence their recording and analysis involves heavy commitments of memory and processing time. This fact motivates the search for compact execution histories.

We develop the notion of a "critical node" to decide whether a node in a program flow graph needs to appear more than once in an execution history for dynamic slicing. A compact execution history named Selective Execution Trajectory (SET) is designed for dynamic slicing in which only critical nodes appear more than once; all other nodes appear at most once in the history. A method to construct SET through instrumentation of a program is described. Performance studies show that for many programs compact execution histories are several orders of magnitude smaller than complete execution histories.