1 research outputs found
Fault Detection Effectiveness of Source Test Case Generation Strategies for Metamorphic Testing
Metamorphic testing is a well known approach to tackle the oracle problem in
software testing. This technique requires the use of source test cases that
serve as seeds for the generation of follow-up test cases. Systematic design of
test cases is crucial for the test quality. Thus, source test case generation
strategy can make a big impact on the fault detection effectiveness of
metamorphic testing. Most of the previous studies on metamorphic testing have
used either random test data or existing test cases as source test cases. There
has been limited research done on systematic source test case generation for
metamorphic testing. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation on the
impact of source test case generation techniques on the fault finding
effectiveness of metamorphic testing. We evaluated the effectiveness of line
coverage, branch coverage, weak mutation and random test generation strategies
for source test case generation. The experiments are conducted with 77 methods
from 4 open source code repositories. Our results show that by systematically
creating source test cases, we can significantly increase the fault finding
effectiveness of metamorphic testing. Further, in this paper we introduce a
simple metamorphic testing tool called "METtester" that we use to conduct
metamorphic testing on these methods.Comment: 8 page