Automated Slicing of Aspect-Oriented Programs Using Bytecode Analysis

Program slicing has numerous applications in software engineering activities like debugging, testing, maintenance, model checking etc. The main objective of this paper is to automate the generation of System Dependency Graphs (SDG) for aspect-oriented programs to efficiently compute accurate slices. The construction of SDG is automated by analysing the byte code of aspect-oriented programs that incorporates the representation of aspect-oriented features. After constructing the SDG, we propose a slicing algorithm that uses the intermediate graph and computes slices for a given AOP. To implement our proposed slicing technique, we have developed a prototype tool that takes an AOP as input and compute its slices using our proposed slicing algorithm. To evaluate our proposed technique, we have considered some case studies by taking open source projects. The comparative study of our proposed slicing algorithm with some existing algorithms show that our approach is an efficient and scalable approach of slicing for different applications with respect to aspect-oriented programs.