How Can Metaheuristics Help Software Engineers?

This paper is a brief description of the revamped presentation based in the original one I had the honor to deliver back in 2009 during the very first SSBSE in London. At this time, the many international forces dealing with search, optimization, and learning (SOL) met software engineering (SE) researchers in person, all of them looking for a quantified manner of modeling and solving problems in software. The contents of this work, as in the original one, will develop on the bases of metaheuristics to highlight the many good ways in which they can help to create a well-grounded domain where the construction, assessment, and exploitation of software are not just based in human expertise, but enhanced with intelligent automatic tools. Since the whole story started well before the first SSBSE in 2009, we will mention a few previous applications in software engineering faced with intelligent algorithms, as well as will discuss on the present interest and future challenges of the domain, structured in both short and long term goals. If we understand this as a cross-fertilization task between research fields, then we could learn a wider and more useful lesson for innovative research. In short, we will have here a semantic perspective of the old times (before SBSE), the recent years on SBSE, and the many avenues for future research and development spinning around this exciting clash of stars. A new galaxy has been born out of the body of knowledge in SOL and SE, creating forever a new class of researchers able of building unparalleled tools and delivering scientific results for the benefit of software, that is, of modern societies.