Dynamic slicing of concurrent programs: Where are we and where is the right way?

Program slicing has been developed as a standard technique used in various software engineering activities including program understanding, testing, debugging, maintenance, and complexity measurement. Although both static and dynamic slicing of sequential programs have been applied to software engineering practices, there still are some challenges, problems and issues in slicing concurrent programs, in particular, dynamic slicing of concurrent programs. This paper presents a methodological review for dynamic slicing of concurrent programs from the viewpoint of wholeness, uncertainty and self-measurement principles of concurrent systems. The paper proposes that we should develop a dependence / influence analysis method based on self-measurement principle to filter dynamic slices of concurrent programs.