Discovering Metamorphic Relations for Scientific Software From User Forums

Scientific software can be used for decades and is constantly evolving. Recently, metamorphic testing, a property-based testing technique, has shown to be effective in testing scientific software, and the necessary properties are expressed as metamorphic relations. However, the development of metamo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computing in science & engineering 2021-03, Vol.23 (2), p.65-72
Main Authors: Lin, Xuanyi, Simon, Michelle, Peng, Zedong, Niu, Nan, Carver, Jeffrey, Morris, Karla
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational modeling
End users
Environmental protection
Java
metamorphic relations
metamorphic testing
Numerical models
Scientific computing
scientific software
Software
Software engineering
Software testing
Stormwater management
user validation
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Summary:Scientific software can be used for decades and is constantly evolving. Recently, metamorphic testing, a property-based testing technique, has shown to be effective in testing scientific software, and the necessary properties are expressed as metamorphic relations. However, the development of metamorphic relations is difficult: it requires considerable practical expertise for the software tester. In this article, we report our experience of uncovering metamorphic relations from a user forum's questions of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). Our study not only illustrates a wealth of end users' expertise in interpreting software results, but also demonstrates the usefulness of classifying the user-oriented metamorphic relations into a nominal, ordinal, and functional hierarchy mainly from the software output perspective.
ISSN:1521-9615
1558-366X
DOI:10.1109/MCSE.2020.3046973