Search-based software engineering: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:43, 14 May 2007

Revision as of 15:49, 14 May 2007

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==Brief history==

One of the earliest attempts in applying [[optimization]] to a [[software engineering]] problem was reported by Miller and Spooner in 1976 in the area of software testing<ref>W. Miller and D. L. Spooner, Automatic Generation of Floating-Point Test Data, ''IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering'', Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 223-226 (1976)</ref>. Xanthakis et al. <ref>S. Xanthakis, C. Ellis, C. Skourlas, A. Le Gall, S. Katsikas and K. Karapoulios, Application of genetic algorithms to software testing, In ''Proceedings of the 5th5^th International Conference on Software Engineering and its Applications'', pp. 625-636 (1992)</ref> apply for the first time a search technique to a [[software engineering]] problem in 1992. The term SBSE was first used in 2001 by Harman and Jones<ref>M. Harman and B. F. Jones, Search-based software engineering, ''Information & Software Technology'', Vol. 43, No. 14, pp. 833-839 (2001)</ref>.

==Application areas==

[[Software testing]] has been one of the major applications of search techniques in [[software engineering]]<ref>P. McMinn, Search-based software test data generation: a survey, ''Software Testing, Verification and Reliability'', Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 105-156 (2004)</ref>. However, search techniques have been applied to other [[software engineering]] activities, for instance: [[requirements analysis]]<ref>D. Greer and G. Ruhe, Software release planning: an evolutionary and iterative approach, ''Information & Software Technology'', Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 243-253 (2004)</ref>, [[software design]]<ref>J. A. Clark and J. L. Jacob, Protocols are programs too: the meta-heuristic search for security protocols, ''Information & Software Technology'', Vol. 43, No. 14, pp. 891-904 (2001) </ref>, [[software development]]<ref>E. Alba and F. Chicano, Software Project Management with GAs, ''Information Sciences'', Vol. 177, pp. 2380-2401 (2007)</ref> and [[software maintenance]]<ref>G. Antoniol, M. Di Penta and M. Harman, Search-Based Techniques Applied to Optimization of Project Planning for a Massive Maintenance Project, In ''Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance'', pp. 240-249 (2005)</ref>. In his FoSE paper<ref>M. Harman, The Current State and Future of Search Based Software Engineering, In proceedings''Proceedings of the 29th29^th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2007)'', 20-26 May, Minneapolis, USA (2007)</ref>, Harman identifies the current state of SBSE and highlights future trends in this approach to [[software engineering]].