Dynamic Adaptive Search Based Software Engineering Needs Fast Approximate Metrics

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) uses fitness functions to guide an automated search for solutions to challenging software engineering problems. The fitness function is a form of software metric, so there is a natural and close interrelationship between software metics and SBSE. SBSE can be used as a way to experimentally validate metrics, revealing startling conflicts between metrics that purport to measure the same software attributes. SBSE also requires new forms of surrogate metrics. This topic is less well studied and, therefore, remains an interesting open problem for future work. This paper(1) overviews recent results on SBSE for experimental metric validation and discusses the open problem of fast approximate surrogate metrics for dynamic adaptive SBSE.