In computer programming, static slicing is a software maintenance technique used to identify all program code that can in anyway affect the value of a given variable. The following paragraph informally describes this computation.

Based on the original definition of Weiser, informally, a static program slice S consists of all statements in program P that may affect the value of variable v at some point p. The slice is defined for a slicing criterion C=(x,V), where x is a statement in program P and V is a subset of variables in P. A static slicing includes all the statements that affect variable v for a set of all possible inputs at the point of interest. Static slices are computed by finding consecutive sets of indirectly relevant statements, according to data and control dependencies.

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