No abstract

Financial charting software is widely used in share, commodity and foreign currency exchange markets to visualize and analyze price movements. Its quality is critical because incorrect outputs may lead to wrong analysis and trading decisions, and consequently substantial financial losses. Human visual judgment is often required to test financial charting software because of the graphical complexity of software outputs and limited knowledge of expected outputs. Such approach is labour intensive and error-prone. In this paper, we propose an automated testing technique combining metamorphic testing, assertion checking and a novel data label extraction method to eliminate human visual judgment from testing financial charting software. We used this technique to test pre-release builds of a commercial Point and Figure charting software component, and demonstrated that the proposed technique can effectively detect actual faults in the software component. Further, we discuss how the technique can be extended to test other charting software components.

Many financial trading and charting software packages provide users with technical indicators to analyze and predict price movements in financial markets. Any computation fault in technical indicator may lead to wrong trading decisions and cause substantial financial losses. Testing is a major software engineering activity to detect computation faults in software. However, there are two problems in testing technical indicators in these software packages. Firstly, the indicator values are updated with real-time market data that cannot be generated arbitrarily. Secondly, technical indicators are computed based on a large amount of market data. Thus, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to derive the expected indicator values to check the correctness of the computed indicator values. In this paper, we address the above problems by proposing a new testing technique to detect faults in computation of technical indicators. We show that the proposed technique is effective in detecting computation faults in faulty technical indicators on the MetaTrader 4 Client Terminal.