MT4WS: an automated metamorphic testing system for web services

Sun, Chang ai; Wang, Guan; Wen, Qing; Towey, Dave; Chen, Tsong Yueh

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.

Citation

Sun, C. A., Wang, G., Wen, Q., Towey, D., & Chen, T. Y. (in press). MT4WS: an automated metamorphic testing system for web services. International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 9(1/2), https://doi.org/10.1504/IJHPCN.2016.074663

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 1, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Feb 12, 2016
• Deposit Date: Oct 16, 2017
• Journal: International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking
• Print ISSN: 1740-0562
• Electronic ISSN: 1740-0570
• Publisher: Inderscience
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1/2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJHPCN.2016.074663
• Keywords: web services; test oracle; metamorphic testing; automatic testing; quality assurance; QA; XML; metamorphic relations; web service testing; software testing
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/776477
• Publisher URL: http://www.inderscience.com/storage/f611249758103211.pdf
• Related Public URLs: http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=74663