A formal model of program dependences and its implications forsoftware testing, debugging, and maintenance |
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Authors: | Podgurski A Clarke LA |
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Affiliation: | Dept. of Comput. Eng. & Sci., Case Western Reserve Univ., Cleveland, OH; |
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Abstract: | A formal, general model of program dependences is presented and used to evaluate several dependence-based software testing, debugging, and maintenance techniques. Two generalizations of control and data flow dependence, called weak and strong syntactic dependence, are introduced and related to a concept called semantic dependence. Semantic dependence models the ability of a program statement to affect the execution behavior of other statements. It is shown that weak syntactic dependence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for semantic dependence and that strong syntactic dependence is necessary but not sufficient condition for a restricted form of semantic dependence that is finitely demonstrated. These results are used to support some proposed uses of program dependences, to controvert others, and to suggest new uses |
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