A Selection Method of Effective Metamorphic Relations

Abstract

Metamorphic testing can effectively alleviate the test oracle problem. However, the program under test needs to be executed one more time; it is particularly significant to select the metamorphic relation with the highly fault-detecting ability and improve the test cost-effectiveness. Due to the limitations of existing evaluation methods in engineering applications, a validity evaluation method for metamorphic relation is presented based on single factor and multi-factor mutation scores. It can guide their priority ranking and selection. Experiments show that this method can significantly reduce test costs.