Back
Texte intégral
Journal article

MeMo : automatically identifying metamorphic relations in Javadoc comments for test automation

  • Blasi, Arianna Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Gorla, Alessandra IMDEA Software Institute, Spain
  • Ernst, Michael D. University of Washington, USA
  • Pezzè, Mauro Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera - SIT Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Switzerland
  • Carzaniga, Antonio Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Show more…
    15.07.2021
Published in:
  • Journal of systems and software. - Elsevier. - 2021, vol. 181, p. 13
Software testing
Test oracle generation
Natural language processing
English Software testing depends on effective oracles. Implicit oracles, such as checks for program crashes, are widely applicable but narrow in scope. Oracles based on formal specifications can reveal applicationspecific failures, but specifications are expensive to obtain and maintain. Metamorphic oracles are somewhere in-between. They test equivalence among different procedures to detect semantic failures. Until now, the identification of metamorphic relations has been a manual and expensive process, except for few specific domains where automation is possible. We present MeMo, a technique and a tool to automatically derive metamorphic equivalence relations from natural language documentation, and we use such metamorphic relations as oracles in automatically generated test cases. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that 1) MeMo can effectively and precisely infer equivalence metamorphic relations, 2) MeMo complements existing state-of-the-art techniques that are based on dynamic program analysis, and 3) metamorphic relations discovered with MeMo effectively detect defects when used as test oracles in automatically-generated or manually-written test cases.
Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1319212
Statistics
Document views: 52 File downloads:
  • Blasi_jss_2021.pdf: 109