Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

Comparison of Special Value Testing and Metamorphic Testing: Using the Properties of SUT

Amanjot Singh, Sandeep kang, Parminder Singh

Abstract


When testing a program, correctly executed test cases are seldom explored further, even though they may carry useful information. Metamorphic testing proposes to generate follow-up test cases to check important properties of the target function. It does not need a human oracle for output prediction and comparison. An “oracle” in software testing is a procedure by which testers can decide whether the output of the program under testing is correct. In some situations, however, the oracle is not available or too difficult to apply. This is known as the “oracle problem”. The manual prediction and verification of program output greatly decreases the efficiency and increases the cost of testing. A metamorphic testing method has been proposed to test programs without the involvement of an oracle. It employs properties of the target function, known as metamorphic relation to process the inputs, and verify the outputs automatically. In this paper we propose a study in which we compare the metamorphic testing with special value testing using mathematical function of matrix multiplication.

Keywords


Metamorphic Testing (MT), Metamorphic Relation (MR), Software Under Test(SUT), Oracle, Successful Test Case, Automated Testing, Follow-Up Test Cases

Full Text:

PDF

References


Beizer, B. Software Testing Techniques, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, „1990‟.

T. J. Cheatham, J. P. Yoo, and N. J. Wahl. Software testing: a machine learning experiment. In Proc. of the ACM 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Science, „1995‟.

T. Y. Chen, S. C. Cheung, and S. Yiu. Metamorphic testing: a new approach for generating next test cases. Technical Report HKUST-CS98-01, Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, „1998‟.

Chen, T.Y., Cheung, S.C., and Yiu, S.M. Metamorphic testing: a new approach for generating next testcases, Technical Report HKUST-CS98-01, Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, „1998‟.

Chen, T.Y., Feng, J., and Tse, T.H. Metamorphic testing of programs on partial differential equations: a case study, In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2002), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, „2002‟

Chen, T.Y., Kuo, F.-C., Liu, Y., and Tang, A. Metamorphic testing and testing with special values, In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel /Distributed Computing (SNPD 2004), International Association for Computer and Information Science, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, „2004‟.

Chen, T.Y., Tse, T.H., and Zhou, Z.Q., Fault-based testing without the need of oracles, Information and Software Technology, 45 (1), „2003‟.

Gotlieb, A. and Botella, B. Automated metamorphic testing, In Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference(COMPSAC 2003), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, „2003‟

Tsong Yueh Chen, Fei–Ching Kuo*, Ying Liu and Antony Tang School of Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.