Program slicing in the presence of database state

Program slicing has long been recognised as a valuable technique for supporting the software maintenance process. However, many programs operate over some kind of external state, as well as the internal program state. Arguably the most significant form of external state is that used to store data associated with the application, for example, in a database management system. In this paper we propose an approach to supporting slicing over both program and database state, which requires the introduction of two new forms of data dependency into the standard program dependency graph. Our method expands the usefulness of program slicing techniques to the considerable number of database application programs that are being maintained within industry and science today.