Search-based Software Engineering for Modern Software Systems

Realizing modern software systems poses new challenges to the software engineers: Users of applications running on limited capability devices still demand acceptable performance, users of systems relying on artificial intelligence to take decision (rightly) reclaim a fair treatment; users of social networking systems expect to be protected against malicious behaviours. Moreover, AI-enabled software systems are so energy-greedy that their usage is causing an alarming surge in energy consumption with a significant increase in CO2 emissions. Equipping software with appealing functionalities and minimising faults, is not enough if the emerging non-functional properties of these systems, such as fairness, safety, and sustainability, are not considered.

In this talk, I will discuss opportunity to use Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE) to optimise modern software systems (functional and) non-functional properties. In fact, we cannot expect that a software engineer, regardless of their level of expertise, would be able to manually find all opportunities for optimising them. I will introduce SBSE, review research trends and discuss directions and open challenges towards achieving better software.