[go: nahoru, domu]
Jump to content

Search-based software engineering

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jeneffer.sys (talk | contribs) at 00:46, 14 May 2015 (→‎Project management). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) applies metaheuristic search techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search to software engineering problems. Many activities in software engineering can be stated as optimization problems. Optimization techniques of operations research such as linear programming or dynamic programming are mostly impractical for large scale software engineering problems because of their computational complexity. Researchers and practitioners use metaheuristic search techniques to find near-optimal or "good-enough" solutions.

SBSE problems can be divided into two types:

  • black-box optimization problems, for example, assigning people to tasks (a typical combinatorial optimization problem).
  • white-box problems where operations on source code need to be considered.[1]

Definition

SBSE converts a software engineering problem and into a computational search problem that can be tackled with a metaheuristic. This involves defining a search space, or the set of possible solutions. This space is typically too large to be explored exhaustively, suggesting a metaheuristic approach. A metric [2] (also called a fitness function, cost function, objective function or quality measure) is then used to measure the quality of potential solutions. Many software engineering problems can be reformulated as a computational search problem.[3]

The term "search-based application", in contrast, refers to using search engine technology, rather than search techniques, in another industrial application.

Brief history

One of the earliest attempts to apply optimization to a software engineering problem was reported by Webb Miller and David Spooner in 1976 in the area of software testing.[4] In 1992, S.Xanthakis and his colleagues applied a search technique to a software engineering problem for the first time.[5] The term SBSE was first used in 2001 by Harman and Jones.[6] The research community grew to include more than 800 authors by 2013, spanning approximately 270 institutions in 40 countries.[citation needed]

Application areas

Search-based software engineering is applicable to almost all phases of the software development process. Software testing has been one of the major applications.[7] Search techniques have been applied to other software engineering activities, for instance, requirements analysis,[8][9] design,[10] development,[11] and maintenance.[12]

Requirements engineering

Requirements engineering is the process by which the needs of a software's users and environment are determined and managed. Search-based methods have been used for requirements selection and optimisation with the goal of finding the best possible subset of requirements that matches user requests amid constraints such as limited resources and interdependencies between requirements. This problem is often tackled as a multiple-criteria decision-making problem and, generally involves presenting the decision maker with a set of good compromises between cost and user satisfaction.[13][14]

Debugging and maintenance

Identifying a software bug (or a code smell) and then debugging (or refactoring) the software is largely a manual and labor-intensive endeavor, though the process is tool-supported. One objective of SBSE is to automatically identify and fix bugs (for example via mutation testing).

Genetic programming, a biologically-inspired technique that involves evolving programs through the use of crossover and mutation, has been used to search for repairs to programs by altering a few lines of source code. The GenProg Evolutionary Program Repair software repaired 55 out of 105 bugs for approximately $8 each in one test.[15]

Coevolution adopts a "predator and prey" metaphor in which a suite of programs and a suite of unit tests evolve together and influence each other.[16]

Testing

Search-based software engineering has been applied to software testing, including automatic generation of test cases (test data), test case minimization and test case prioritization. Regression testing has also received some attention.

Optimizing software

The use of SBSE in program optimization, or modifying a piece of software to make it more efficient in terms of speed and resource use, has been the object of successful research. In one instance, a 50,000 line program was genetically improved, resulting in a program 70 times faster on average.[17]

Project management

A number of decisions that are normally made by a project manager can be done automatically, for example, project scheduling.[18]

According to the guide worldwide conhecimdo the PMBOK Guide in its 5th Edition, which provides guidelines for management of individual projects and defines concepts associated with project management. This also describes the life cycle of the project management and related processes, as well as the project life cycle.

The PMBOK Guide recognizes 47 processes that fall into five process groups and 10 knowledge areas that are typical in almost all project areas.

Description of the project management process groups:

  1. Initiation
  2. Planning
  3. Execution
  4. Monitoring and control
  5. Closing

The 10 main areas of expertise are:

Each knowledge area is a set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a project management expertise field. In the 5th PMBOK we have 10 knowledge areas, which are:

  • Project Integration Management
  • Project Scope Management
  • Project Time Management
  • Project Cost Management
  • Project Quality Management
  • project Human resources management
  • Project Communications Management
  • Project Risk Management
  • Project Procurement Management
  • Project involved management

According to the guide worldwide conhecimdo the PMBOK Guide in its 5th Edition, which provides guidelines for management of individual projects and defines concepts associated with project management. This also describes the life cycle of the project management and related processes, as well as the project life cycle.

The PMBOK Guide recognizes 47 processes that fall into five process groups and 10 knowledge areas that are typical in almost all project areas.

Description of the project management process groups:

• Initiation • Planning • Execution • Monitoring and control • Closing

[19]

Tools

Tools available for SBSE include OpenPAT.[20] and Evosuite [21] and a code coverage measurement for Python[22]

Methods and techniques

A number of methods and techniques are available, including:

•Profiling[23] via instrumentation in order to monitor certain parts of a program as it is executed.

•Obtaining an abstract syntax tree associated with the program, which can be automatically examined to gain insights into its structure.

•Applications of program slicing relevant to SBSE include software maintenance, optimization and program analysis.

•Code coverage allows measuring how much of the code is executed with a given set of input data.

•Static program analysis

Industry acceptance

As a relatively new area of research, SBSE does not yet experience broad industry acceptance. Software engineers are reluctant to adopt tools over which they have little control or that generate solutions that are unlike those that humans produce.[24] In the context of SBSE use in fixing or improving programs, developers need to be confident that any automatically produced modification does not generate unexpected behavior outside the scope of a system's requirements and testing environment. Considering that fully automated programming has yet to be achieved, a desirable property of such modifications would be that they need to be easily understood by humans to support maintenance activities.[25]

Another concern is that SBSE might make the software engineer redundant. Supporters claim that the motivation for SBSE is to enhance the relationship between the engineer and the program.[26]

See also

References

  1. ^ Harman, Mark (2010). "Why Source Code Analysis and Manipulation Will Always be Important". 10th IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2010). 10th IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2010). pp. 7–19. doi:10.1109/SCAM.2010.28. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Harman, Mark; John A. Clark (2004). "Metrics are fitness functions too". Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Software Metrics, 2004. 10th International Symposium on Software Metrics, 2004. pp. 58–69. doi:10.1109/METRIC.2004.1357891. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ Clark, John A. (2003). "Reformulating software engineering as a search problem". IEE Proceedings - Software. 150 (3): 161–175. doi:10.1049/ip-sen:20030559. ISSN 1462-5970. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ Miller, Webb; Spooner, David L. (1976). "Automatic Generation of Floating-Point Test Data". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. SE-2 (3): 223–226. doi:10.1109/TSE.1976.233818. ISSN 0098-5589.
  5. ^ 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 5th International Conference on Software Engineering and its Applications, Toulouse, France, 1992, pp. 625–636
  6. ^ Harman, Mark; Jones, Bryan F. (15 December 2001). "Search-based software engineering". Information and Software Technology. 43 (14): 833–839. doi:10.1016/S0950-5849(01)00189-6. ISSN 0950-5849. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  7. ^ McMinn, Phil (2004). "Search-based software test data generation: a survey". Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. 14 (2): 105–156. doi:10.1002/stvr.294. ISSN 1099-1689. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  8. ^ Greer, Des; Ruhe, Guenther (15 March 2004). "Software release planning: an evolutionary and iterative approach". Information and Software Technology. 46 (4): 243–253. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2003.07.002. ISSN 0950-5849. Retrieved 6 September 2013.
  9. ^ Colares, Felipe; Souza, Jerffeson; Carmo, Raphael; Pádua, Clarindo; Mateus, Geraldo R. (2009). "A New Approach to the Software Release Planning". XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, 2009. SBES '09. XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, 2009. SBES '09. pp. 207–215. doi:10.1109/SBES.2009.23. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  10. ^ Clark, John A.; Jacob, Jeremy L. (15 December 2001). "Protocols are programs too: the meta-heuristic search for security protocols". Information and Software Technology. 43 (14): 891–904. doi:10.1016/S0950-5849(01)00195-1. ISSN 0950-5849. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  11. ^ Alba, Enrique; Chicano, J. Francisco (1 June 2007). "Software project management with GAs". Information Sciences. 177 (11): 2380–2401. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2006.12.020. ISSN 0020-0255. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  12. ^ Antoniol, Giuliano; Di Penta, Massimiliano; Harman, Mark (2005). "Search-based techniques applied to optimization of project planning for a massive maintenance project". Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2005. ICSM'05. Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2005. ICSM'05. pp. 240–249. doi:10.1109/ICSM.2005.79. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  13. ^ Zhang, Yuanyuan (February 2010). Multi-Objective Search-based Requirements Selection and Optimisation (Ph.D.). Strand, London, UK: University of London.
  14. ^ Y. Zhang and M. Harman and S. L. Lim, "Search Based Optimization of Requirements Interaction Management," Department of Computer Science, University College London, Research Note RN/11/12, 2011.
  15. ^ Le Goues, Claire; Dewey-Vogt, Michael; Forrest, Stephanie; Weimer, Westley (2012). "A systematic study of automated program repair: Fixing 55 out of 105 bugs for $8 each". 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). pp. 3–13. doi:10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227211. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  16. ^ Arcuri, Andrea; Yao, Xin (2008). "A novel co-evolutionary approach to automatic software bug fixing". IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 2008. CEC 2008. (IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence). IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 2008. CEC 2008. (IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence). pp. 162–168. doi:10.1109/CEC.2008.4630793. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  17. ^ Langdon, William B.; Harman, Mark. "Optimising Existing Software with Genetic Programming" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.
  18. ^ Minku, Leandro L.; Sudholt, Dirk; Yao, Xin (2012). "Evolutionary algorithms for the project scheduling problem: runtime analysis and improved design". Proceedings of the fourteenth international conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation conference. GECCO '12. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 1221–1228. doi:10.1145/2330163.2330332. ISBN 978-1-4503-1177-9. Retrieved 31 October 2013. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  19. ^ PROJECT MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE. Um Guia do Conhecimento em Gerenciamento de Projetos: Guia PMBOK. 4ª Edição. Pennsylvania: Global Standard, 2008.
  20. ^ Mayo, M. (2013). Predicting Regression Test Failures Using Genetic Algorithm-Selected Dynamic Performance Analysis Metrics (PDF). Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering (SSBSE). Vol. 8084. pp. 158–171. {{cite conference}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  21. ^ (http://www.evosuite.org/)
  22. ^ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/coverage
  23. ^ http://java-source.net/open-source/profilers
  24. ^ Jones, Derek (18 October 2013). "Programming using genetic algorithms: isn't that what humans already do ;-)". The Shape of Code. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  25. ^ Le Goues, Claire; Forrest, Stephanie; Weimer, Westley (1 September 2013). "Current challenges in automatic software repair". Software Quality Journal. 21 (3): 421–443. doi:10.1007/s11219-013-9208-0. ISSN 1573-1367. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
  26. ^ Simons, Christopher L. (May 2013). Whither (away) software engineers in SBSE?. First International Workshop on Combining Modelling with Search-Based Software Engineering,First International Workshop on Combining Modelling with Search-Based Software Engineering. San Francisco, USA: IEEE Press. pp. 49–50. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Search-based_software_engineering&oldid=662233330"