Call for papers, Advances in Search-Based Software Engineering

Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE) is a research area focused on the formulation of software engineering problems as search problems, and the subsequent use of complex heuristic techniques to attain optimal solutions to such problems. A wealth of engineering challenges - from test generation, to design refactoring, to process organization - can be solved efficiently through the application of automated optimization techniques. SBSE is a growing field - sitting at the crossroads between AI, machine learning, and software engineering - and SBSE techniques have begun to attain human-competitive results. We invite the submission of high quality papers describing novel and original work in all areas of SBSE including, but not limited to, applications of SBSE to novel problems, theoretical analyses of search algorithms for software engineering, rigorous empirical evaluations of SBSE techniques, and reports of industrial experiences. We also make a special invitation to well-reviewed papers from the 15th SSBSE meeting (San Francisco, December 2023). Each such paper would be expected to have a new title and significant new content (at least 30% delta between the conference and journal papers). Papers would be required to discuss the original paper and the extensions explicitly. Topics for this special edition will include (but not limited to): -Applications of search-based techniques throughout the software engineering lifecycle -Theoretical analyses of search algorithms -Exact operational research techniques to nature-inspired algorithms, local search metaheuristics, and simulated annealing. -Reports on software engineering applications to which SBSE has not been applied before.