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

Grapheur: A Software Architecture for Reactive and Interactive Optimization

Abstract This paper proposes a flexible software architecture for interactive multiobjective optimization, with a user interface for visualizing the results and facilitating the solution analysis and decision making process. The architecture is modular, it allows for problem-specific extensions, and it is applicable as a post-processing tool for all optimization schemes with a number of different potential solutions. When the architecture is tightly coupled to a specific problem-solving or optimization method, effective interactive schemes where the final decision maker is in the loop can be developed. An application to Reactive Search Optimization is presented. Visualization and optimization are connected through user interaction: the user is in the loop and the system rapidly reacts to user inputs, like specifying a focus of analysis, or preferences for exploring and intensifying the search in interesting areas. The novelty of the visualization approach consists of using recent online graph drawing techniques, with sampling and mental map preserving schemes, in the framework of stochastic local search optimization. Anecdotal results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach are shown for some relevant optimization tasks.

Arbeitsorganisation und neue Technik Abschlussbericht zum Arbeit-und-Technik-Projekt 'Neugestaltung der Arbeits-und Organisationsstrukturen mit neuen Technologien in der Bueromoebelfertigung zum Abbau von Belastungen - Hauptphase'

SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: F94B1322+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Search Based Software Engineering

This paper was written to accompany the author's keynote talk for the Workshop on Computational Science in Software Engineering held in conjunction with International Conference in Computational Science 2006 in Reading, UK. The paper explains how software engineering activities can be viewed as a search for solutions that balance many competing constraints to achieve an optimal or near optimal result.The aim of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) research is to move software engineering problems from human-based search to machine-based search, using a variety of techniques from the metaheuristic search, operations research and evolutionary computation paradigms. As a result, human effort moves up the abstraction chain to focus on guiding the automated search, rather than performing it. The paper briefly describes the search based approach, providing pointers to the literature