Matrix Multiplication Program: a Case Study of Metamorphic Testing

Software testing is one of phases in software engineering process that has a very important role to determine the quality of software under test. In software testing, after generating and selecting test cases, and executing them, the outputs need to be checked against a test oracle to determine whether any failures detected or not. Oracle problem is one of the biggest problems in Software testing. It is a condition where a test oracle can not be obtained or too expensive to be used in testing. Metamorphic Testing is a new testing approach designed to alleviate oracle problem. This approach makes use the crucial properties of software under testing, to determine some Metamorphic Relations (MRs). MRs is used to generate follow-up test cases based on original test cases, known as source test cases. The relations are also used to verify whether test passes or fails. This paper presents a use of Metamorphic Testing in testing a program implementing a matrix multiplication. Five Metamorphic Relations are identified and implemented to test five Mutant programs having intentionally bug inserted. All Mutants have been successfully killed by test cases generated by the five Metamorphic Relations. It showed that the generated MRs have been effective enough in conducting Metamorphic Testing for this case study.