Finding Metamorphic Relations for Scientific Software

Abstract

Metamorphic testing uncovers defects by checking whether a relation holds among multiple software executions. These relations are known as metamorphic relations (MRs). For scientific software operating in a large multi-parameter input space, identifying MRs that determine the simultaneous changes among multiple variables is challenging. In this poster, we propose a fully automatic approach to classifying input and output variables from scientific software’s user manual, mining these variables’ associations from the user forum to generate MRs, and validating the MRs with existing regression tests. Preliminary results of our end-to-end MR support for the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) are reported.