On the Correlation between the Effectiveness of Metamorphic Relations and Dissimilarities of Test Case Executions

Metamorphic testing (MT) is a property-based automated

software testing method. It alleviates the oracle problem

by testing programs against metamorphic relations (MRs), which

are necessary properties among multiple executions of the target

program. For a given problem, usually more than one MR

can be identified. It is therefore of practical importance for

testers to know the nature of good MRs, that is, which MRs

are likely to have higher chances of revealing failures. To

address this issue we investigate the correlation between the faultdetection

effectiveness of MRs and the dissimilarity (distance) of

test case execution profiles. Empirical study results reveal that

there is a strong and statistically significant positive correlation

between the fault-detection effectiveness and the distance. The

findings of this research can help to develop automated means of

selecting/prioritizing MRs for cost-effective metamorphic testing.