Distributed dynamic slicing of Java programs

We propose a novel dynamic slicing technique for distributed Java programs. We first construct the intermediate representation of a distributed Java program in the form of a set of Distributed Program Dependence Graphs (DPDG). We mark and unmark the edges of the DPDG appropriately as and when dependencies arise and cease during run-time. Our algorithm can run parallely on a network of computers, with each node in the network contributing to the dynamic slice in a fully distributed fashion. Our approach does not require any trace files to be maintained. Another advantage of our approach is that a slice is available even before a request for a slice is made. This appreciably reduces the response time of slicing commands. We have implemented the algorithm in a distributed environment. The results obtained from our experiments show promise.