An iterative metamorphic testing technique for web services and case studies. (16th October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sun, Chang-ai; Fu, An; Liu, Yiqiang; Wen, Qing; Wang, Zuoyi; Wu, Peng; Chen, Tsong Yueh
• Is Part Of: International journal of web and grid services. Volume 16:Number 4(2020)
• Page Start: 364
• Page End: 392
• Publication Date: 2020-10-16
• Subjects: metamorphic testing -- metamorphic relations -- test case generation -- web services; Web services -- Periodicals; Computational grids (Computer systems) -- Periodicals; 006.78
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1741-1106

Abstract

Metamorphic testing (MT) is an innovative approach to alleviating the oracle problem in software testing, which uses metamorphic relations of the program under test, instead of the test oracles, to verify its outputs. To alleviate the oracle problem of testing web services, we had previously proposed an MT framework for web services. In this paper, we further improve the efficiency and automation of this framework by leveraging metamorphic relations to iteratively generate test cases. We present a fixed-size iterative MT algorithm and implement it in the MT framework. We conduct three case studies to evaluate the fault detection effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Experimental results suggest that, compared with the conventional MT, iterative MT can achieve a comparable fault detection effectiveness, but with significantly fewer resources. Observations and limitations are summarised to provide new insights into the application of iterative MT.