Metamorphic Testing on Scientific Programs for Solving Second‐Order Elliptic Differential Equations

ABSTRACT Practical problems in scientific computation that solve differential equations rarely have explicit exact solutions. Therefore, verifying the correctness of such programs has long been a challenge due to the difficulty of producing expected outputs on test cases. In this paper, the principles of metamorphic testing are applied to verify programs that solve second‐order elliptic differential equations. We present a testing process specifically tailored for the verification testing of scientific computation programs and integrate it to the process of developing scientific software. Unlike existing approaches, we formally derive metamorphic relations from the numerical models of differential equations built in development process of scientific computing programs. The experimental results clearly show that our approach is effective in detecting faults commonly found in scientific computing programs. It outperforms the fault detecting ability of the trend method, which is a traditional testing method for scientific software.