Integration of Metamorphic Testing with, Program Repair Methods Based on, Adaptive Search Strategies and Program Equivalence

Abstract

Automated program repair (APR) is a promising approach to localize faults and generate patches for program under repair. One of the test suite based APR techniques, a method leveraging Adaptive search strategies and program Equivalence (AE), has been commonly used for program repair. AE assumes the availability of test oracles, which brings the oracle problem to AE repair procedure. Metamorphic Testing (MT) has been introduced to alleviate the test oracle problem, and it tests the correctness of programs through metamorphic relations (MRs) which are relations among multiple inputs and outputs. This paper presents an integration of AE with MT (referred to as AE-MT) to extend the applicability of AE to those applications with oracle problems. To evaluate the repair effectiveness of AE-MT, an empirical study is conducted against IntroClass benchmark. We conclude that AE-MT outperforms AE in terms of success rate, but is of lower repair quality than AE.