Tsong Yueh Chen

Tsong helped originate metamorphic testing and has continued to develop its foundations and applications with collaborators. Used by software testers and researchers, including those working on AI systems, the method offers a way to reveal inconsistencies when expected answers are hard to establish. Co-authored publications explain the approach and document its ability to find previously unknown defects in security-relevant software.

Tsong Yueh Chen is a Professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, and helped establish metamorphic testing. The approach checks relationships between results from related inputs when the correct answer to an individual test is difficult to specify. The foundational 1998 report, co-authored with S. C. Cheung and S. M. Yiu, proposed generating new tests from executions that appeared to pass, uncovering errors still hidden in software.

Tsong Yueh has since advanced both the underlying methodology and its practical applications across software engineering. Co-authored reviews examine key research challenges, from identifying useful relationships to generating effective test suites. Studies in cybersecurity demonstrated how metamorphic testing reveals previously unknown bugs in compilers and code obfuscators, proving that checking related outputs can expose defects missed by conventional checks.

Alongside Huai Liu, Tsong Yueh secured Australian Research Council Discovery Projects 2026 funding to identify the specific test cases that reveal failures in metamorphic testing. The project aims to improve debugging and overall software reliability, extending a long-term research programme dedicated to making difficult-to-check software more testable.