Metamorphic Testing in Bioinformatics Software: A Case Study on Metagenomic Assembly
MetaCompass is a metagenomic assembly tool developed by the Pop Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. Such tools are vital for studying the DNA of the variety of microorganisms present in mixed environmental samples, but they can be difficult to test due to the infeasibility of assessing the correctness of the output of a given test case. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple metamorphic test that detects inconsistencies in the popular assembly tools MEGAHIT and Pilon, upon which MetaCompass relies. These inconsistencies were not detected during the development process by standard testing procedures, despite the fact that they may be introducing undesirable noise into MetaCompass’s results. Our results suggest that metamorphic testing is a valuable tool for finding otherwise subtle defects in metagenomic assembly software.
Mon 9 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | Metamorphic Testing for SimulationMET at MET room Chair(s): Upulee Kanewala University of North Florida | ||
11:00 30mTalk | Testing Ocean Software with Metamorphic Testing MET Quang-Hung Luu Swinburne University of Technology, Huai Liu Swinburne University of Technology, Tsong Yueh Chen Swinburne University of Technology, Hai L. Vu Monash University | ||
11:30 30mTalk | Metamorphic Testing in Bioinformatics Software: A Case Study on Metagenomic Assembly MET Brook Stacy Fraunhofer, USA CMA, Jason Hauzel Fraunhofer, USA CMA, Mikael Lindvall Fraunhofer USA CESE, Adam Porter University of Maryland, Mihai Pop University of Maryland, College Park | ||
12:00 30mTalk | On the Validation of Distributed Systems Simulation using Metamorphic Testing MET Alberto Núňez University Complutense of Madrid, Spain., Pablo C Canizares Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, Pablo Gómez-Abajo Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Esther Guerra Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Juan de Lara Autonomous University of Madrid | ||