Title:
Practical Challenges in Object-Oriented Dependence Analysis

Abstract:
Dependence analysis forms the basis for an ever-growing list of powerful verification and validation techniques. These have been used  for tasks such as  disentangling unmanageable legacy systems written in languages such as Cobol, or to debug and inspect programs written in C. WIth the rapid uptake of object-oriented languages, there have been several attempts to adapt such techniques to object-oriented systems. However, due to a conspiracy of factors including scale, dynamic binding, and the structural dispersal of functionality, their use remains confined to small, academic case studies. This talk will present an overview of these problems, drawing on the practical experiences from developing a slicing-based code inspection tool for Java programs. It concludes by arguing that many of these challenges can be overcome, and provides some suggestions on how this could be achieved.