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

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.