The tool was developed in C with a user interface written using the MIT Athena Widgets and the X Window System.
Program slicing is useful in program debugging, software maintenance and program understanding.
Program slices can be used to reduce the effort in examining software by allowing a software auditor to focus attention on one computation at a time. By combining program slices with logical set operations, unravel can identify code that is executed in more than one computation. This information is immediately useful for addressing issues of high integrity software, since a failure involving this code may lead to a malfunction of more than one logical software component. In the case of safety systems, which commonly use several computations for protection, common code among them can provide a single point of failure. In the case of security, what may have been perceived as a secure path may be penetrated by an otherwise unsuspected approach.