A Revisit of the Integration of Metamorphic Testing and Test Suite Based Automated Program Repair

Abstract

The technique of metamorphic testing (MT) has been integrated with test suite based automated program repair (APR) to alleviate the test oracle problem of APR. The proposed integration yields APR-MT techniques, which can be applied regardless of the existence of a test oracle. In a previous study, the feasibility and effectiveness of the APR-MT technique have been demonstrated via GenProg-MT, an integration of MT and the APR technique GenProg. This paper aims to complement our previous study to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of APR-MT across different categories of APR techniques. We present the integration of MT with CETI, an APR technique belonging to a different category to GenProg, and conductexperimental analysis on the integrated technique CETI-MT, showing that CETI-MT is comparable to CETI in terms of the repair effectiveness. These results not only demonstrate the feasibility of integrating MT with different categories of APR techniques, but also consolidate the effectiveness of APR-MT techniques, hence increasing the practical benefits of APR-MT techniques.