Abstract
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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.