Eliminating Human Visual Judgment from Testing of Financial Charting Software

Financial charting software is widely used in share, commodity and foreign currency exchange markets to visualize and analyze price movements. Its quality is critical because incorrect outputs may lead to wrong analysis and trading decisions, and consequently substantial financial losses. Human visual judgment is often required to test financial charting software because of the graphical complexity of software outputs and limited knowledge of expected outputs. Such approach is labour intensive and error-prone. In this paper, we propose an automated testing technique combining metamorphic testing, assertion checking and a novel data label extraction method to eliminate human visual judgment from testing financial charting software. We used this technique to test pre-release builds of a commercial Point and Figure charting software component, and demonstrated that the proposed technique can effectively detect actual faults in the software component. Further, we discuss how the technique can be extended to test other charting software components.