A theoretical and empirical study of EFSM dependence

Dependence analysis underpins many activities in software maintenance such as comprehension and impact analysis. As a result, dependence has been studied widely for programming languages, notably through work on program slicing. However, there is comparatively little work on dependence analysis at the model level and hitherto, no empirical studies. We introduce a slicing tool for Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) and use the tool to gather empirical results on several forms of dependence found in ten EFSMs, including well-known benchmarks in addition to real-world EFSM models. We investigate the statistical properties of dependence using statistical tests for correlation and formalize and prove four of the empirical findings arising from our empirical study. The paper thus provides the maintainer with both empirical data and foundational theoretical results concerning dependence in EFSM models.

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