On Search Based Software Evolution

Writing software is a difficult and expensive task. Its automation is hence very valuable. Search algorithms have been successfully used to tackle many software engineering problems. Unfortunately, for some problems the traditional techniques have been of only limited scope, and search algorithms have not been used yet. We hence propose a novel framework that is based on a co-evolution of programs and test cases to tackle these difficult problems.This framework can be used to tackle software engineering tasks such as automatic refinement, fault correction,improving non-functional criteria and reverse engineering.While the programs evolve to accomplish one of these tasks, test cases are co-evolved at the the same time to find new faults in the evolving programs.