Automatic system testing of programs without test oracles

Metamorphic testing has been shown to be a simple yet effective technique in addressing the quality assurance of applications that do not have test oracles, i.e., for which it is difficult or impossible to know what the correct output should be for arbitrary input. In metamorphic testing, existing test case input is modified to produce new test cases in such a manner that, when given the new input, the application should produce an output that can easily be computed based on the original output. That is, if input x produces output f (x), then we create input x’ such that we can predict f (x’) based on f (x); if the application does not produce the expected output, then a defect must exist, and either f (x) or f (x’) (or both) is wrong. In practice, however, metamorphic testing can be a manually intensive technique for all but the simplest cases. The transformation of input data can be laborious for large data sets, or practically impossible for input that is not in humanreadabl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Christian Murphy, Kuang Shen, Gail E. Kaiser
• Keywords: Input, ISSTA 2009, Metamorphic Testing, Software Engineering, Test Case Input