The relationship of slicing and debugging to program understanding

The paper describes a study that explores the relationship between program slicing and code understanding gained while debugging. The study consisted of an experiment that compared the program understanding abilities of two classes of debuggers: those who slice while debugging and those who do not. For debugging purposes, a slice can be thought of as a minimal subprogram of the original code that contains the program faults. Those who only examine statements within a slice for correctness are considered slicers; all others are considered non-slicers. Using accuracy of reconstruction as a measure of understanding, it was determined that slicers have a better understanding of the code after debugging.