An oracle in software testing is a mechanism for checking whether the system under test has behaved correctly for any executions. In some situations, oracles are unavailable or too expensive to apply. This is known as the oracle problem. It is crucial to develop techniques to address it, and metamorphic testing (MT) was one of such proposals. This paper conducts a controlled experiment to investigate the cost effectiveness of using MT by 38 testers on three open-source programs. The fault detection capability and time cost of MT are compared with the popular assertion checking method. Our results show that MT is cost-efficient and has potentials for detecting more faults than the assertion checking method.

Abstract. This paper describes experiences in using the precise definition of a process for chemotherapy administration and as the basis for analyses aimed at finding and correcting defects, leading to improvements in efficiency and patient safety. The work is a collaboration between Computer Science researchers and members of the professional staff of a major regional cancer center. The work entails the use of the Little-JIL process definition language for creating the precise definitions, the PROPEL system for creating precise specifications of process requirements, and the FLAVERS systems for analyzing process definitions. The paper describes the details of using these technologies, by demonstrating how they have been applied to successfully identify defects in the chemotherapy process. Although this work is still ongoing, early experiences suggest that our approach is viable and promising. The work has also helped us to learn about the desiderata for process definition and analysis technologies that are expected to be more broadly applicable to other domains. 1

In this paper, we describe some of the key observations resulting from our work on using software engineering technologies to help detect errors in medical processes. In many ways, medical processes are similar to distributed systems in their complexity and proneness to contain errors. We have been investigating the application of a continuous process improvement approach to medical processes in which detailed and semantically rich models of the medical processes are created and then subjected to rigorous analyses. The technologies we applied helped improve understanding about the processes and led to the detection of errors and subsequent improvements to those processes. This work is still preliminary, but is suggesting new research directions for medical process improvement, software engineering technologies, and the applicability of these technologies to other domains involving human-intensive processes.

In the context of our research program we addressed the question whether or not requirements documents contain information about system level properties that can be exploited to automatically create assertions for run-time checks of these properties. In this technical report we define the concept of property template and report details on the studies we carried out to address this question. The results are presented in the form of a catalog of property templates, and details from the individual studies showing which properties occur in which projects. 1

This paper shows how software engineering technologies used to define and analyze complex software systems can also be effective in detecting defects in human-intensive processes used to administer healthcare. The work described here builds upon earlier work demonstrating that healthcare processes can be defined precisely. This paper describes how finite-state verification can be used to help find defects in such processes as well as find errors in the process definitions and property specifications. The paper includes a detailed example, based upon a real-world process for transfusing blood, where the process defects that were found led to improvements in the process.

A test oracle in software testing is a mechanism for checking whether the program under test behaves correctly for any execution. In some practical situations, oracles can be unavailable or too expensive to apply. Metamorphic testing (MT) was proposed to alleviate this problem so that software can be delivered under the time-to-market pressure. However, the effectiveness of MT has not been studied adequately. This paper conducts a controlled experiment to investigate the cost effectiveness of using MT. The fault detection capability and time cost of MT are compared with the standard assertion checking method. Our results show that MT has potentials to detect more faults than the assertion checking method. The experiment results also show a trade-off between the two testing methods: MT can be less efficient but more effective, and can be defined at a coarser level of granularity than the assertion checking method.

Abstract—Property specification is still one of the most challenging tasks for transference of software verification technology like model checking. The use of patterns has been proposed in order to hide the complicated handling of formal languages from the developer. However, this goal is not entirely satisfied. When validating the pattern the developer may have to deal with the pattern expressed in some particular formalism. For this reason, we identify three desirable quality attributes for the underlying specification language: succinctness, ease of validation and modifiability. We show that typical formalisms such as temporal logics or automata fail at some extent to support these features. In this work we propose FVS, a graphical scenariobased language, as a possible alternative to specify behavioral properties. We illustrate FVS ’ features by describing one of the most commonly used pattern, the Response Pattern, and several variants of it. Other known patterns such as the Precedence pattern and the Constrained Chain pattern are also discussed. We also thoroughly compare FVS against other used approaches. I.