Transformed search based software engineering: A new paradigm of SBSE

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the sharp growth of research interests in Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) from the society of Software Engineering (SE). In SBSE, a SE task is generally transferred into a combinatorial optimization problem and search algorithms are employed to achieve solutions within its search space. Since the terrain of the search space is rugged with numerous local optima, it remains a great challenge for search algorithms to achieve high-quality solutions in SBSE. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm of SBSE, namely Transformed Search Based Software Engineering (TSBSE). Given a new SE task, TSBSE first transforms its search space into either a reduced one or a series of gradually smoothed spaces, then employ search algorithms to effectively seek high-quality solutions. More specifically, we investigate two techniques for TSBSE, namely search space reduction and search space smoothing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these new techniques over a typical SE task, namely the Next Release Problem (NRP). The work of this paper provides a new way for tackling SE tasks in SBSE.