Program Tailoring: Slicing by Sequential Criteria (Artifact)

Abstract

Protocol and typestate analyses often report some sequences of statements ending at a program point P that needs to be scrutinized, since P may be erroneous or imprecisely analyzed. Program slicing focuses only on the behavior at P by computing a slice of the program affecting the values at P. In our companion paper "Program Tailoring: Slicing by Sequential Criteria", we propose to focus on the subset of that behavior at P affected by one or several statement sequences, called a sequential criterion (SC). By leveraging the ordering information in a SC, e.g., the temporal order in a few valid/invalid API method invocation sequences,  we introduce a new technique, program tailoring, to compute a tailored program that comprises the statements in all possible execution paths passing through at least one sequence in SC in the given order. 

This artifact is based on TAILOR, a prototyping implementation of program tailoring, to evaluate the usefulness of TAILOR in practice. The provided package is designed to support repeatability of all the experiments of our companion paper. Specifically, it allows users to reproduce the results for all the three research questions addressed in the evaluation section of our companion paper. In addition, an extensive set of extra results, which are not described in the companion paper, are also included, in order to help users better understand this work.