Metamorphic Testing for Infrastructure-as-Code Engines

David Spielmann, George Zakhour, Dominik Arnold, Matteo Biagiola, Roland Meier, Guido Salvaneschi. 2026. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages.

Read the paper · doi:10.1145/3798226

What this paper does with SQLancer

One citation in the formalism section, noting that Rigger and Su applied metamorphic testing to database management systems and uncovered numerous bugs in popular systems -- the precedent EMIaC carries into a different class of engine. EMIaC applies metamorphic testing to Infrastructure-as-Code engines such as Terraform, OpenTofu and Pulumi, which the authors note have received little attention compared with the correctness of IaC programs themselves. It defines metamorphic relations as graph-based transformations of IaC programs and checks invariants across executions, using e-graphs both as an input generator and as an equivalence oracle. Three of its test cases were merged into Terraform. Written by claude-opus-5 from the 1 place this paper refers to SQLancer. The quotations below are the paper's own words, stored verbatim when the text was extracted.

How it was classified

uses infrastructure — no

SQLancer is cited, not used; nothing in the mentions describes reusing its code.

extends technique — no

No technique is extended; the citation is background.

compares with — no

No empirical comparison against SQLancer is reported in the mentions.

describes as state of the art — no

The citation does not characterise SQLancer as the state of the art.

SQLancer publications it cites (2)

Bibliography entries that resolved to a SQLancer publication, or to a paper by one of the project's authors. A sentence citing one of these numbers is a reference to SQLancer even when it never writes the name.

#	Entry	Matched as
58	Manuel Rigger and Zhendong Su. 2020. Detecting optimization bugs in database engines via non-optimizing reference engine construction. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conf...	sqlancer publication · NOREC
59	Manuel Rigger and Zhendong Su. 2020. Finding bugs in database systems via query partitioning. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4, OOPSLA, Article 211 (Nov. 2020), 30 pages. doi:10.1145/3428279	sqlancer publication · TLP

Every place it refers to SQLancer (1)

1 sentence, each stored verbatim from the extracted text with where it was found and how. “Citation marker” means the sentence names no tool at all and was reached through a reference number that resolved to a SQLancer publication.

Id	Sentence	Found by	Where
M1	Notably, Rigger and Su [58,59]applied MT to database management systems and uncovered numerous bugs in popular systems.	citation marker background	4.6 Formalism page 24

This page is rendered from _data/papers/paper_doi_10_1145_3798226.json, extracted from supplied pdf. 29 pages, 77 references parsed.