54th HiRSE Seminar
On Thursday, 25th June at 11:00 CEST, Sebastian Müller from Universität Potsdam will join us at the HiRSE Seminar Series to talk about “When you don’t know what to test for: Metamorphic Testing for Research Software”
Abstract:
As research software becomes increasingly complex and interdisciplinary, assuring its quality and keeping the software well maintained requires testing approaches that go beyond conventional correctness checking.
Traditional unit testing techniques are often insuffiecient in research software contexts where expected outcomes may be uncertain, stochastic, or influenced by complex simulation contexts. Not being able to predict what the correct output of a program should be for a given input is known in the literature as the oracle problem.
This talk presents practical strategies for tackling the oracle problem within standard automated testing frameworks, such as pyunit. Rather than abandoning unit tests, the focus is on rethinking the assertions they rely on. One complementary approach will be discussed in depth: Metamorphic Testing. The technique will be illustrated with real-world, scientific software examples.
The seminar is aimed at RSEs and developers of research software with a basic knowledge of automated testing who want to strengthen their testing knowledge with practices suited for hard-to-test research software protoypes.
The announcement and connection details are posted here:
- HiRSE-internal HiRSE Mattermorst channel,
- HIFIS Mattermost channel,
- Helmholtz Open Science Mattermost channel,
- FZJ-internal #rse Rocket.Chat channel,
- de-RSE mailing list and de-RSE Mattermost channel,
- Helmholtz Open Science Pro Mailinglist,
- RSE mailing lists of the HiRSE partners (if any).
If you are unable to join via one of these channels please email hirse@fz-juelich.de.
Location: virtual