Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

ANTIDS: Self-Organized Ant-based Clustering Model for Intrusion Detection System

Security of computers and the networks that connect them is increasingly becoming of great significance. Computer security is defined as the protection of computing systems against threats to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. There are two types of intruders: the external intruders who are unauthorized users of the machines they attack, and internal intruders, who have permission to access the system with some restrictions. Due to the fact that it is more and more improbable to a system administrator to recognize and manually intervene to stop an attack, there is an increasing recognition that ID systems should have a lot to earn on following its basic principles on the behavior of complex natural systems, namely in what refers to self-organization, allowing for a real distributed and collective perception of this phenomena. With that aim in mind, the present work presents a self-organized ant colony based intrusion detection system (ANTIDS) to detect intrusions in a network infrastructure. The performance is compared among conventional soft computing paradigms like Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines and Linear Genetic Programming to model fast, online and efficient intrusion detection systems.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Swarm Intelligence and Patterns (SIP)- special track at WSTST 2005, Muroran, JAPA

Ways of Applying Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have become more powerful and easier to use they are increasingly deployed as key components of modern software systems. While this enables new functionality and often allows better adaptation to user needs it also creates additional problems for software engineers and exposes companies to new risks. Some work has been done to better understand the interaction between Software Engineering and AI but we lack methods to classify ways of applying AI in software systems and to analyse and understand the risks this poses. Only by doing so can we devise tools and solutions to help mitigate them. This paper presents the AI in SE Application Levels (AI-SEAL) taxonomy that categorises applications according to their point of AI application, the type of AI technology used and the automation level allowed. We show the usefulness of this taxonomy by classifying 15 papers from previous editions of the RAISE workshop. Results show that the taxonomy allows classification of distinct AI applications and provides insights concerning the risks associated with them. We argue that this will be important for companies in deciding how to apply AI in their software applications and to create strategies for its use

A Survey on Software Testing Techniques using Genetic Algorithm

The overall aim of the software industry is to ensure delivery of high quality software to the end user. To ensure high quality software, it is required to test software. Testing ensures that software meets user specifications and requirements. However, the field of software testing has a number of underlying issues like effective generation of test cases, prioritisation of test cases etc which need to be tackled. These issues demand on effort, time and cost of the testing. Different techniques and methodologies have been proposed for taking care of these issues. Use of evolutionary algorithms for automatic test generation has been an area of interest for many researchers. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is one such form of evolutionary algorithms. In this research paper, we present a survey of GA approach for addressing the various issues encountered during software testing.Comment: 13 Page

Evolving a rule system controller for automatic driving in a car racing competition

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. Perth, Australia, 15-18 December 2008.The techniques and the technologies supporting Automatic Vehicle Guidance are important issues. Automobile manufacturers view automatic driving as a very interesting product with motivating key features which allow improvement of the car safety, reduction in emission or fuel consumption or optimization of driver comfort during long journeys. Car racing is an active research field where new advances in aerodynamics, consumption and engine power are critical each season. Our proposal is to research how evolutionary computation techniques can help in this field. For this work we have designed an automatic controller that learns rules with a genetic algorithm. This paper is a report of the results obtained by this controller during the car racing competition held in Hong Kong during the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008).Publicad

Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination

This paper defines software fairness and discrimination and develops a testing-based method for measuring if and how much software discriminates, focusing on causality in discriminatory behavior. Evidence of software discrimination has been found in modern software systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to financial products, and determine who is allowed to participate in promotions. Our approach, Themis, generates efficient test suites to measure discrimination. Given a schema describing valid system inputs, Themis generates discrimination tests automatically and does not require an oracle. We evaluate Themis on 20 software systems, 12 of which come from prior work with explicit focus on avoiding discrimination. We find that (1) Themis is effective at discovering software discrimination, (2) state-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, at times discriminating against as much as 98% of an input subdomain, (3) Themis optimizations are effective at producing efficient test suites for measuring discrimination, and (4) Themis is more efficient on systems that exhibit more discrimination. We thus demonstrate that fairness testing is a critical aspect of the software development cycle in domains with possible discrimination and provide initial tools for measuring software discrimination.Comment: Sainyam Galhotra, Yuriy Brun, and Alexandra Meliou. 2017. Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination. In Proceedings of 2017 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Paderborn, Germany, September 4-8, 2017 (ESEC/FSE'17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3106277, ESEC/FSE, 201