Web Application Slicing

The growing importance of Web applications for our society makes their quality critical. Both development of new applications and evolution of existing ones are areas which demand for support techniques and tools. Program slicing revealed a useful way to limit the search of software defects during debugging and to better understand the decomposition of the application into computations. We propose to extend the extraction of slices to Web applications, in order to produce a reduced Web application which behaves as the original one with respect to some criterion, i.e., some displayed information of interest. After presenting the theoretical implications of applying slicing to Web applications, we will demonstrate its usefulness with reference to an example, derived from a survey of a set of travel agency sites. Web application slicing helps disclosing relevant information and understanding the internal system structur