Some metamorphic relations （MR） are not good at detecting faults in metamorphic testing. In this paper, the method of making compositional MR （CMR） based on the speculative law of proposition logic is presented. This method constructs new MRs by composing existing MRs in a pairwise way. Because CMR contains all the advantages of the MRs that form it, its fault detection performance is wonderful. On the other hand, the number of relations will decrease greatly after composing, so a program can be tested with much fewer test cases when CMRs are used. In order to research the characteristics of a CMR, two case studies are analyzed. The experimental results show that the CMR＇s performance is mostly determined by the central MRs forming it and the sequence of composition. Testing efficiency is improved greatly when CMRs are used.
The capability of improving software reliability is one of the main objectives of software testing.However,the...
BAI Cheng-Gang,JIANG Chang-Hai,CAI Kai-Yuan National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Holistic Control Department of Automatic Control,Beihang University,Beijing 100191,P.R.China
This paper uses three size metrics,which are collectable during the design phase,to analyze the potentially confounding effect of class size on the associations between object-oriented（OO）metrics and maintainability.To draw as many general conclusions as possible,the confounding effect of class size is analyzed on 127 C＋＋ systems and 113 Java systems.For each OO metric,the indirect effect that represents the distortion of the association caused by class size and its variance for individual systems is first computed.Then,a statistical meta-analysis technique is used to compute the average indirect effect over all the systems and to determine if it is significantly different from zero.The experimental results show that the confounding effects of class size on the associations between OO metrics and maintainability generally exist,regardless of whatever size metric is used.Therefore,empirical studies validating OO metrics on maintainability should consider class size as a confounding variable.
