I/O Associations in Scientific Software: A Study of SWMM

Understanding which input and output variables are related to each other is important for metamorphic testing, a simple and effective approach for testing scientific software. We report in this paper a quantitative analysis of input/output (I/O) associations based on co-occurrence statistics of the user manual, as well as association rule mining of a user forum, of the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). The results show a positive correlation of the identified I/O pairs, and further reveal the complementary aspects of the user manual and user forum in supporting scientific software engineering tasks.