A Formal Model of Program Dependences and Its Implications for Software Testing, Debugging, and Maintenance

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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