Metamorphic Testing Integer Overflow Faults of Mission Critical Program: A Case Study

Zhanwei Hui,Song Huang,Yi Yao,Zhengping Ren

doi:10.1155/2013/381389

Abstract

For mission critical programs, integer overflow is one of the most dangerous faults. Different testing methods provide several effective ways to detect the defect. However, it is hard to validate the testing outputs, because the oracle of testing is not always available or too expensive to get, unless the program throws an exception obviously. In the present study, the authors conduct a case study, where the authors apply a metamorphic testing (MT) method to detect the integer overflow defect and alleviate the oracle problem in testing critical program of Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Experimental results show that, in revealing typical integer mutations, compared with traditional safety property testing method, MT with a novel symbolic metamorphic relation is more effective than the traditional method in some cases.

Highlights

Integer overflow is one of the most important dangerous faults, which is crucial for mission critical programs which are usually related to critical functions or services
A Case Study In Section 3, we introduce the relationships between metamorphic testing and metamorphic relation, which could be used to instruct the testing of this section, in which we conduct a case study, aiming to investigate the effectiveness of our method in verification of integer faults
This is a design bug that the programmer cannot take into account in the implementation or design process, and this goes beyond our discussion about integer defects detection

Summary

Introduction

Integer overflow is one of the most important dangerous faults, which is crucial for mission critical programs which are usually related to critical functions or services. For testing integer defects, which could be considered as one of the most important faults of mission critical software failures and classified into four categories [9], we first enumerate the metamorphic relations that such application would be expected to demonstrate, for a given implementation determine whether each relation is a necessary property to reveal program correctness. If it is, an unexpected change could exhibit the violation of the relation, Mathematical Problems in Engineering.

Preliminaries

Relationships between Metamorphic Testing and Metamorphic Relation

A Case Study

Conclusions