Title: MT4WS: an automated metamorphic testing system for web services

Authors: Chang-ai Sun; Guan Wang; Qing Wen; Dave Towey; Tsong Yueh Chen

Addresses: School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China ' School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China ' School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China ' School of Computer Science, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo 315100, China ' Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne 3122, Australia

Abstract: The use of web services has been growing significantly, with increasingly large numbers of applications being implemented through the web. A difficulty associated with this development is the quality assurance of these services, specifically the challenges encountered when testing the applications - amongst other things, testers may not have access to the source code, and the correctness of the output may not be easily ascertained (known as the oracle problem). Metamorphic testing (MT) has been introduced as a technique to alleviate the oracle problem. MT makes use of properties of the software under test, known as metamorphic relations, and checks whether or not these relations are violated. Since MT does not require source code to generate the metamorphic relations, it is suitable for testing web services-based applications. We have designed an XML-based language representation to facilitate the formalisation of metamorphic relations, the generation of (follow-up) test cases, and the verification of the test results. Based on this, we have also developed a tool to support the automation of MT for web service applications. This tool has been used in an experiment to test web services, the evaluation of which is reported in this paper.

Keywords: web services; test oracle; metamorphic testing; automatic testing; quality assurance; QA; XML; metamorphic relations; web service testing; software testing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2016.074663

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2016 Vol.9 No.1/2, pp.104 - 115

Received: 24 Sep 2014
Accepted: 04 Nov 2014
Published online: 12 Feb 2016 *

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