skip to main content
10.1145/2896971.2896977acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesisstaConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

The impact of source test case selection on the effectiveness of metamorphic testing

Published: 14 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Metamorphic Testing (MT) aims to alleviate the oracle problem. In MT, testers define metamorphic relations (MRs) which are used to generate new test cases (referred to as follow-up test cases) from the available test cases (referred to as source test cases). Both source and follow-up test cases are executed and their outputs are verified against the relevant MRs, of which any violation implies that the software under test is faulty. So far, the research on the effectiveness of MT has been focused on the selection of better MRs (that is, MRs that are more likely to be violated). In addition to MR selection, the source and follow-up test cases may also affect the effectiveness of MT. Since follow-up test cases are defined by the source test cases and MRs, selection of source test cases will then affect the effectiveness of MT. However, in existing MT studies, random testing is commonly adopted as the test case selection strategy for source test cases. This study aims to investigate the impact of source test cases on the effectiveness of MT. Since Adaptive Random Testing (ART) has been developed as an enhancement to Random Testing (RT), this study will focus on comparing the performance of RT and ART as source test case selection strategies on the effectiveness of MT. Experiment results show that ART outperforms RT on enhancing the effectiveness of MT.

References

[1]
A. C. Barus. Testing Heuristic Method, Software Engineering Techniques, Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume 4980, 2011, pp. 246--260.
[2]
A. C. Barus. An In-depth Study of Adaptive Random Testing for Testing Program with Complex Input Types, Ph.D. dissertation, Swinburne University of Technology, 2010.
[3]
E. J. Weyuker, On testing non-testable programs, The Computer Journal, vol. 25, No. 4, 1982, pp. 465--470.
[4]
T. Y. Chen, S. Cheung, and S. Yiu, Metamorphic testing: a new approach for generating next test cases, Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Tech. Rep. HKUST-CS98-01, 1998.
[5]
T. Y. Chen, H. Leung, and I. K. Mak, 2004. Adaptive Random Testing, In Proceedings of the 9th Asian Computing Science Conference, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3321, 2004, pp. 320--329.
[6]
W. K. Chan, S. C. Cheung, and K. R. P. H. Leung. A Metamorphic Testing Approach for Online Testing of Service-Oriented Software Applications, a Special Issue on Service Engineering of International Journal of Web Services Research, vol. 4, No. 2, 2007, pp. 60--80.
[7]
T. Y. Chen, D. H. Huang, T. H. Tse, and Z. Q. Zhou. Case studies on the selection of useful relations in metamorphic testing, in Proceedings of the 4th lbero-American Symposium on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineer-ing (JIISIC). Polytechnic University of Madrid, 2004, pp. 569--583.
[8]
T. Y. Chen, T. H. Tse, and Z. Q. Zhou. Semi-proving: an integrated method based on global symbolic evaluation and metamorphic testing, in Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA). ACM Press, New York, 2002, pp. 191--195.
[9]
T. Y. Chen, T. H. Tse, and Y. T. Yu, Proportional sampling strategy: A compendium and some insights, Information and Software Technology, vol. 58, No. 1, 2001, pp. 65--81.
[10]
F.-C. Kuo, On adaptive random testing, Ph.D. dissertation, Swinburne University of Technology, 2006.
[11]
P. E. Ammann and J. C. Knight, Data diversity: an approach to software fault tolerance, IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 37, No. 4, 1998, pp. 418--425.
[12]
P. G. Bishop, The variation of software survival times for diffrent operational input profiles, in FTSC-23. Digitest of Papers, the Twenty-Third International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1993, pp. 98--107.
[13]
R. Merkel, Analysis and enhancements of adaptive random testing, Ph.D. dissertation, Swinburne University of Technology, 2005.
[14]
M. Hutchins, H. Foster, T. Goradia, and T. Ostrand, Experiments on the effectiveness of dataflow and controlfow-based test adequacy criteria, in Proceedings of International Conference of Software Engineering, 2004, pp. 191--200.
[15]
G. Rothermel, E. Sebastian, H. Do, and A. Kinneer, Software-artifact infrastructure repository, {Online}. Available: http://sir.unl.edu.
[16]
S. G. Elbaum, A. G. Malishevsky, and G. Rothermel, Prioritizing test cases for regression testing, in In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2000), ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 2000, pp. 102--112.
[17]
T. J. Ostrand and M. J. Balcer, The category-partition method for specifying and generating functional tests, Communications of the ACM, vol. 31, No. 6, June 1988.
[18]
X. Xie, W. E. Wong, T. Y. Chen, B. W. Xu, Metamorphic Slice: An Application in Spectrum-based Fault Localization, Information and Software Technology, 2013, vol. 55, No. 5, pp. 866--879.
[19]
T. Y. Chen, F.-C. Kuo, R. Merkel, On the statistical properties of testing effectivenes measures, Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 79, No. 5, 2006, pp. 591--601.
[20]
A. C. Barus, T. Y. Chen, F.-C. Kuo, H. Liu, R. Merkel, G. Rothermel, A Novel Linear-Order Algorithm for Adaptive Random Testing of Programs with Non-Numeric Inputs, Technical Report TR-UNL-CSE-2014-0004, University of Nebraska Lincoln, US, 2014.
[21]
H. Liu, F.-C. Kuo, D. Towey, T. Y. Chen, How Effectively Does Metamorphic Testing Alleviate the Oracle Problem?, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 40, No. 1, January 2014.
[22]
Z. Q. Zhou, S. Zhang, M. Hagenbuchner, T. H. Tse, F. -C. Kuo, T. Y. Chen, Automated functional testing of online search services, Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, vol. 22, No. 4, 2012, pp. 221--243.
[23]
Y. Cao, Z. Q. Zhou, T. Y. Chen, On the Correlation between the Effectiveness of Metamorphic Relations and Dissimilarities of Test Case Executions, in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of Quality Software, 2013, pp. 153--162.
[24]
The GNU Project, Grep home page, accessed 2015-11-01 {Online}, Available: http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html.
[25]
K.-P. Chan, T. Y. Chen, and D. Towey, Forgetting test cases, In Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 06, 2006, pp 485--494.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
MET '16: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Metamorphic Testing
May 2016
59 pages
ISBN:9781450341639
DOI:10.1145/2896971
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 May 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. adaptive random testing
  2. metamorphic testing
  3. source test case selection

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ICSE '16
Sponsor:

Upcoming Conference

ISSTA '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)26
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 09 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media