Research of Testing for Scientific Computing Software in the Area of Nuclear Power Based on Metamorphic Testing

It has long been known that there are software applications for which it is difficult to detect subtle errors, faults, defects, or anomalies because there is no reliable “test oracle” to indicate what the correct output should be for arbitrary input. The absence of a test oracle clearly presents a challenge in testing the software applications of scientific computing from the domain of nuclear power plant. Metamorphic testing has been shown to be a simple yet effective technique in addressing the quality assurance of these “non-testable programs.” In this paper, we introduce Metamorphic testing method to address the oracle problem as mentioned above. We identify a metamorphic relation for a real-world scientific computing programs which do not have test oracles, and demonstrate the effectiveness of metamorphic testing in identifying the error.