A formal model of program dependences and its implications for software testing, debugging, and maintenance
- 1 September 1990
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Vol. 16 (9) , 965-979
- https://doi.org/10.1109/32.58784
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.Keywords
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