Effectiveness of Teaching Metamorphic Testing

This paper is an attempt to understand the effectiveness of teaching metamorphic properties in a senior/graduate software engineering course classroom environment through gauging the success achieved by students in identifying these properties on the basis of the lectures and materials provided in class. The main findings were: (1) most of the students either misunderstood what metamorphic properties are or fell short of identifying all the metamorphic properties in their respective projects, (2) most of the students that were successful in finding all the metamorphic properties in their respective projects had incorporated certain arithmetic rules into their project logic, and (3) most of the properties identified were numerical metamorphic properties. A possible reason for this could be that the two relevant lectures given in class cited examples of metamorphic properties that were based on numerical properties. Based on the findings of the case study, pertinent suggestions were made in order to improve the impact of lectures provided for Metamorphic Testing