Contract-based slicing

Abstract

In the last years, the concern with the correctness of programs has been leading programmers to enrich their programs with annotations following the principles of design-by-contract, in order to be able to guarantee their correct behaviour and to facilitate reuse of verified components without having to reconstruct proofs of correctness. In this paper we adapt the idea of specification-based slicing to the scope of (contract-based) program verification systems and behaviour specification languages. In this direction, we introduce the notion of contract-based slice of a program and show how any specification-based slicing algorithm can be used as the basis for a contract-based slicing algorithm.