Program Slicing: A Brief Retrospective

Program slicing is a software analysis technique conceived of and developed in the late 70s and early 80s by the late Mark Weiser to remove code from a program that does not affect a given computation. A program slice is any selection of program statements that maintains the same behavior as the original program at a specific point while considering a particular set of variables, known as the slicing criterion. This technique permits a software engineer to focus on an immediate computation and safely ignore statements and variables that do not contribute to that focus. We will briefly review the basics of program slicing and some of the myriad of related techniques and applications that developed over the years to tackle the problems that software engineers confront while sitting at their workstations.