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

Use Case Point Approach Based Software Effort Estimation using Various Support Vector Regression Kernel Methods

The job of software effort estimation is a critical one in the early stages of the software development life cycle when the details of requirements are usually not clearly identified. Various optimization techniques help in improving the accuracy of effort estimation. The Support Vector Regression (SVR) is one of several different soft-computing techniques that help in getting optimal estimated values. The idea of SVR is based upon the computation of a linear regression function in a high dimensional feature space where the input data are mapped via a nonlinear function. Further, the SVR kernel methods can be applied in transforming the input data and then based on these transformations, an optimal boundary between the possible outputs can be obtained. The main objective of the research work carried out in this paper is to estimate the software effort using use case point approach. The use case point approach relies on the use case diagram to estimate the size and effort of software projects. Then, an attempt has been made to optimize the results obtained from use case point analysis using various SVR kernel methods to achieve better prediction accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 11 Tables, International Journal of Information Processing (IJIP

Predictive biometrics: A review and analysis of predicting personal characteristics from biometric data

Interest in the exploitation of soft biometrics information has continued to develop over the last decade or so. In comparison with traditional biometrics, which focuses principally on person identification, the idea of soft biometrics processing is to study the utilisation of more general information regarding a system user, which is not necessarily unique. There are increasing indications that this type of data will have great value in providing complementary information for user authentication. However, the authors have also seen a growing interest in broadening the predictive capabilities of biometric data, encompassing both easily definable characteristics such as subject age and, most recently, `higher level' characteristics such as emotional or mental states. This study will present a selective review of the predictive capabilities, in the widest sense, of biometric data processing, providing an analysis of the key issues still adequately to be addressed if this concept of predictive biometrics is to be fully exploited in the future

Using genetic algorithms to generate test sequences for complex timed systems

The generation of test data for state based specifications is a computationally expensive process. This problem is magnified if we consider that time con- straints have to be taken into account to govern the transitions of the studied system. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a complete methodology, sup- ported by tools, that addresses this issue by represent- ing the test data generation problem as an optimisa- tion problem. We use heuristics to generate test cases. In order to assess the suitability of our approach we consider two different case studies: a communication protocol and the scientific application BIPS3D. We give details concerning how the test case generation problem can be presented as a search problem and automated. Genetic algorithms (GAs) and random search are used to generate test data and evaluate the approach. GAs outperform random search and seem to scale well as the problem size increases. It is worth to mention that we use a very simple fitness function that can be eas- ily adapted to be used with other evolutionary search techniques

Forensic Face Recognition: A Survey

Beside a few papers which focus on the forensic aspects of automatic face recognition, there is not much published about it in contrast to the literature on developing new techniques and methodologies for biometric face recognition. In this report, we review forensic facial identification which is the forensic experts‟ way of manual facial comparison. Then we review famous works in the domain of forensic face recognition. Some of these papers describe general trends in forensics [1], guidelines for manual forensic facial comparison and training of face examiners who will be required to verify the outcome of automatic forensic face recognition system [2]. Some proposes theoretical framework for application of face recognition technology in forensics [3] and automatic forensic facial comparison [4, 5]. Bayesian framework is discussed in detail and it is elaborated how it can be adapted to forensic face recognition. Several issues related with court admissibility and reliability of system are also discussed. \ud Until now, there is no operational system available which automatically compare image of a suspect with mugshot database and provide result usable in court. The fact that biometric face recognition can in most cases be used for forensic purpose is true but the issues related to integration of technology with legal system of court still remain to be solved. There is a great need for research which is multi-disciplinary in nature and which will integrate the face recognition technology with existing legal systems. In this report we present a review of the existing literature in this domain and discuss various aspects and requirements for forensic face recognition systems particularly focusing on Bayesian framework