Editorial for the Special Issue on Search-based Software Engineering

摘要

It is with great pleasure that we accepted the privilege of editing this special issue of Software: Practice and Experience on the practical aspects of Search-based Software Engineering. Software systems are becoming ever larger and more complex as new architectures emerge, high-performance hardware becomes increasingly affordable, and systems must satisfy often highly constrained operating requirements. However, many traditional approaches to software design and implementation are unable to scale to meet the challenges presented by such systems. For this reason, a recent trend has been to automate tasks within the software engineering life cycle using machine-based search; this approach is known as Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE). The engineering task is reformulated as an optimization problem and solutions are found using efficient modern optimization algorithms, such as meta-heuristic search and operational research methods. SBSE promises much greater scalability than traditional labour-intensive methods since human effort is redirected to guide the search for solutions to the engineering problem, rather than perform the search itself.