cid 244212ae91af31601a405ef653a89d9b93d00d9718701a4287fbc6feb9faf728 · original · open access · via openalex
Title: A Survey on Metamorphic Testing Authors: Sergio Segura; Gordon Fraser; Ana B. Sánchez; Antonio Ruiz–Cortés Venue: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Year: 2016 Canonical: doi:10.1109/tse.2016.2532875 URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2016.2532875 Collector: openalex OA: true 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.