IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering· 2016Q1· Review
A Survey on Metamorphic Testing
- 541citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2016year
Short summary
Metamorphic testing offers a way to verify software when traditional output-based checks are impractical, by verifying how outputs change after input transformations.
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Key points
- Metamorphic testing verifies software by observing output changes after input transformations, bypassing the need for explicit expected outputs.
- The technique is useful for complex programs where formal input-output relations are hard to establish.
- This survey consolidates research findings, application areas, and common practices in metamorphic testing.
- It also highlights the main open challenges in the field.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
A test oracle determines whether a test execution reveals a fault, often by comparing the observed program output to the expected output. This is not always practical, for example when a program's input-output relation is complex and difficult to capture formally. Metamorphic testing provides an alternative, where correctness is not determined by checking an individual concrete output, but by applying a transformation to a test input and observing how the program output “morphs” into a different one as a result. Since the introduction of such metamorphic relations in 1998, many contributions on metamorphic testing have been made, and the technique has seen successful applications in a variety of domains, ranging from web services to computer graphics. This article provides a comprehensive survey on metamorphic testing: It summarises the research results and application areas, and analyses common practice in empirical studies of metamorphic testing as well as the main open challenges.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2016 · DOI ↗
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Field: Software
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