Software engineering: an ideal set of challenges for evolutionary computation

  • Authors:

  • Mark Harman

  • Affiliations:

  • University College London, London, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Software is an engineering material to be optimised. Until comparatively recently many computer scientists doubted this; why would one want to optimise something that could be made perfect by pure logical reasoning? However, the wider community has come to realise that, while very small programs may be perfect in isolation, larger software systems may never be (because the world in which they operate is not perfect). Once we accept this, we soon arrive at evolutionary computation as a means of optimising software. However, software is not merely some other engineering material to be optimised. Software is virtual and inherently adaptive, making it better suited to evolutionary computation than any other engineering material. This is leading to breakthroughs at the interface of software engineering and evolutionary computation, though there are still many exciting open problems for evolutionary commutation researchers to get their teeth into. This talk will cover some of these recent developments in Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) and Dynamic Adaptive SBSE.