Beyond Program Slicing

Summary

The aim of the "beyond program slicing" seminar was to explore emergent applications of program slicing and ways in which slicing techniques and ideas could be combined with those from other areas of program analysis and manipulation.

To achieve this goal, the seminar gathered together 36 people, including experts in the theory and practice of program slicing and those working on closely related areas, such as model checking, measurement, analysis, debugging, program comprehension, testing, reengineering and semantics.

The seminar was structured to provide a mix of pre-prepared talks and talks on work developed by the participants during the seminar. To achieve this, time was set aside for group working in groups of three. Groups were chosen to facilitate cross pollination of ideas from different fields. There was also time provided for preparation and networking and for tutorials and demonstrations of practical systems. The discussions and collaborative work continued into the small hours every morning, yet all the participants remained energetic and enthusiastic throughout the event.

Several new topics and ideas emerged at the workshop, both through formal presentations by the formally constituted groups of three and through unplanned serendipitous collaboration between the participants. The organisers are confident that several of the abstracts the reader will find under the DROPS proceedings of the workshop will become extended papers, forming the seeds of on-going collaboration and work.

Conclusion

The "beyond program slicing" Dagstuhl seminar was a resounding success with many technical outcomes which will continue to be developed by the inter-locking collaborative working groups formed during the seminar. The strong spirit of co-operation and collaboration which permeated the seminar is also expected to lead to a number of valuable, on-going, infrastructural, efforts to help in the support, facilitation and maturation of this growing community of researcher within source code analysis and manipulation and its application to software engineering.