On effective testing of health care simulation software

  • Authors:

  • Christian Murphy;M. S. Raunak;Andrew King;Sanjian Chen;Christopher Imbriano;Gail Kaiser;Insup Lee;Oleg Sokolsky;Lori Clarke;Leon Osterweil

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;Columbia University, New York, NY, USA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Health care professionals rely on software to simulate anatomical and physiological elements of the human body for purposes of training, prototyping, and decision making. Software can also be used to simulate medical processes and protocols to measure cost effectiveness and resource utilization. Whereas much of the software engineering research into simulation software focuses on validation (determining that the simulation accurately models real-world activity), to date there has been little investigation into the testing of simulation software itself, that is, the ability to effectively search for errors in the implementation. This is particularly challenging because often there is no test oracle to indicate whether the results of the simulation are correct. In this paper, we present an approach to systematically testing simulation software in the absence of test oracles, and evaluate the effectiveness of the technique.