T.H. Tse

T.H. Tse (Chinese: 謝俊謙) is a Hong Kong academic who is a professor and researcher in program testing and debugging. He is ranked internationally as the second most prolific author in metamorphic testing. According to Bruel et al., "Research on integrated formal and informal techniques can trace its roots to the work of T.H. Tse in the mid-eighties." The application areas of his research include object-oriented software, services computing, pervasive computing, concurrent systems, imaging software, and numerical programs. In addition, he creates graphic designs for non-government organizations.

T.H. Tse MBE
Occupation	Honorary Professor
Academic background
Alma mater	London School of Economics
Doctoral advisor	Frank Land; Ian Angell
Academic work
Discipline	Software Engineering
Institutions	The University of Hong Kong
Website	hku.hk/thtse

Tse received the PhD from the London School of Economics in 1988 under the supervision of Frank Land and Ian Angell. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford in 1990 and 1992. He is currently an honorary professor in computer science at The University of Hong Kong after retiring from his full professorship in 2014. He was decorated with an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

In 2013, an international event entitled "The Symposium on Engineering Test Harness" was held in Nanjing, China "in honor of the retirement of T.H. Tse". The acronym of the symposium was "TSE-TH".

In 2017 to 2020, Tse served as the intermediary for the fundraising of $140 million for The University of Hong Kong to establish the Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wings I and II in the Faculty of Engineering.

In 2019, Tse and team applied metamorphic testing to verify the robustness of citation indexing services, including Scopus and Web of Science. The innovative method, known as "metamorphic robustness testing", revealed that the presence of simple hyphens in the titles of scholarly papers adversely affects citation counts and journal impact factors, regardless of the quality of the publications. This "bizarre new finding", as well as the refutation by Web of Science and the clarification by Tse, was reported in ScienceAlert, Nature Index, Communications of the ACM, Psychology Today, and The Australian.

In 2021, Tse and team were selected as the Grand Champion of the Most Influential Paper Award by the Journal of Systems and Software for their 2010 paper. According to Google Scholar, the journal ranks no. 3 in h5-index among international publication venues in software systems.

In 2024, Tse successfully nominated Tsong Yueh Chen of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia to receive the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award 2024 “for contributions to software testing through the invention and development of metamorphic testing”. This award is presented to individual(s) who have made significant and lasting research contributions to the theory or practice of software engineering. The awardees are invited to give a keynote presentation at the ICSE conference. Past winners include Gail Murphy 2023, Lionel Briand 2022, Mark Harman 2019, Daniel Jackson 2017, Carlo Ghezzi 2015, Alexander Wolf 2014, David Notkin 2013, Lori Clarke 2012, David Garlan and Mary Shaw 2011, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides 2010, Axel van Lamsweerde 2008, Elaine J. Weyuker 2007, David Harel 2006, Nancy Leveson 2004, Leon J. Osterweil 2003, Gerard Holzmann 2002, Michael Jackson 2001, Victor Basili 2000, Harlan Mills 1999, Niklaus Wirth 1999, David Parnas 1998, and Barry Boehm 1997.

Handbook of Software Fault Localization: Foundations and Advances, Wiley-IEEE Press (2023). Credit: Cover Design by T.H. Tse.

Books

• W. Eric Wong; T.H. Tse, eds. (2023). Handbook of Software Fault Localization: Foundations and Advances. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley-IEEE Press. ISBN 978-1-119-29180-0.

• T.H. Tse, A Unifying Framework for Structured Analysis and Design Models: An Approach using Initial Algebra Semantics and Category Theory, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 11, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ebook edition (2010). Paperback edition (2009). Hardcover edition (1991).

Selected publications

• Tsong Yueh Chen; T.H. Tse (2021). New visions on metamorphic testing after a quarter of a century of inception. Ideas, Visions and Reflections Track, Proceedings of the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE ’21). ACM, New York, NY, USA. pp. 1487–1490. doi:10.1145/3468264.3473136.

• Zhi Quan Zhou; T.H. Tse; Matt Witheridge (2021). "Metamorphic robustness testing: Exposing hidden defects in citation statistics and journal impact factors". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 47 (6): 1164–1183. doi:10.1109/TSE.2019.2915065.

• Tsong Yueh Chen; Fei-Ching Kuo; Huai Liu; Pak-Lok Poon; Dave Towey; T.H. Tse; Zhi Quan Zhou (2018). "Metamorphic testing: A review of challenges and opportunities". ACM Computing Surveys. 51 (1): 4:1–4:27. hdl:10722/254895.

• Huo Yan Chen; T.H. Tse (2013). "Equality to equals and unequals: A revisit of the equivalence and nonequivalence criteria in class-level testing of object-oriented software". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 39 (11): 1549–1563. doi:10.1109/TSE.2013.33. hdl:10722/187124. S2CID 8694513.

• Tsong Yueh Chen; T.H. Tse; Zhi Quan Zhou (2010). "Semi-proving: An integrated method for program proving, testing, and debugging". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 37 (1): 109–125. doi:10.1109/TSE.2010.23..

• Tsong Yueh Chen; Fei-Ching Kuo; Robert G. Merkel; T.H. Tse (2010). "Adaptive random testing: The ART of test case diversity". Journal of Systems and Software. 83 (1): 60–66. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2009.02.022. hdl:10722/89054.