Metamorphic Relation Generation: State of the Art and Visions for Future Research

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of metamorphic relation generation in metamorphic testing, highlighting recent advances, identifying research gaps, and proposing future directions for improving the theory and techniques in this field.

Contribution

It provides a systematic review of existing methods for generating metamorphic relations and discusses future research trends and visions for advancing the field.

Findings

Metamorphic testing effectively reveals real-world bugs.

Recent studies focus on systematic generation of metamorphic relations.

Future research should enhance relation identification and construction techniques.

Abstract

Metamorphic testing has become one mainstream technique to address the notorious oracle problem in software testing, thanks to its great successes in revealing real-life bugs in a wide variety of software systems. Metamorphic relations, the core component of metamorphic testing, have continuously attracted research interests from both academia and industry. In the last decade, a rapidly increasing number of studies have been conducted to systematically generate metamorphic relations from various sources and for different application domains. In this article, based on the systematic review on the state of the art for metamorphic relations' generation, we summarize and highlight visions for further advancing the theory and techniques for identifying and constructing metamorphic relations, and discuss potential research trends in related areas.