Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC '02),
IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, pp. 327-333 (2002)

Metamorphic Testing of Programs on
Partial Differential Equations: A Case Study 1

T.Y. Chen 2 , J. Feng 3 , and T.H. Tse 2

[paper from IEEE Xplore | paper from IEEE digital library | postprint]

 ABSTRACT

We study the effect of applying metamorphic testing to alleviate the oracle problem for numerical programs. We discuss a case study on the testing of a program that solves an elliptic partial differential equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. We identify a metamorphic relation for the equation and demonstrate the effectiveness of metamorphic testing in identifying the error. The relation identified in the paper should also be applicable to other numerical methods that yield better approximations on the refinement of grid points or step sizes.

Keywords: Program testing, metamorphic testing, oracle problem, partial differential equations

1. This work is supported in part by grants of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 111899 and 702901) and a research and conference grant of The University of Hong Kong.
2. Centre for Software Analysis and Testing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn 3122, Australia.
3. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
4. (Corresponding author.)
Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
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