*** CALL FOR PAPERS AND EXTENSION TO SUBMISSION DATE ***

SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOFTWARE - PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE:
PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF SEARCH-BASED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Guest Editors: Iain Bate and Simon Poulding, University of York, UK
Contact: smp@cs.york.ac.uk
Online CFP: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~smp/spe_sbse_cfp.pdf


SPECIAL ISSUE SCOPE

This special issue of Software - Practice and Experience invites the
submission of original manuscripts describing applied research into the
practical aspects of Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE). We
particularly welcome case studies and other work demonstrating practical
experience of using SBSE to solve real-world or benchmark problems. The
engineering problems solved may relate to any aspect of software design
and implementation, and the search techniques used may include (but are
not limited to) meta-heuristic search algorithms, OR methods, and hybrid
algorithms that combine more than one technique.


KEY DATES

* Please note the extension to the submission date and the revised
* publication schedule since the initial posting to this mailing list.

14 August 2009 Manuscript submission
13 November 2009 Acceptance notification
5 February 2010 Revised manuscript submission
Spring 2010 (tentative) Publication


SUBMISSION

Manuscripts must conform to the submission guidelines for Software -
Practice and Experience (see the 'For Authors' link on the journal
homepage at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/1752/home),
and must not have been published previously or be currently under
consideration for publication in any other journal or conference.
Significant extensions to substantive papers published in conference
proceedings are welcome and must be accompanied by a letter that
details the additional material in the submission to this special issue.

Please submit your manuscript using the online submission system, as
described on the journal homepage referenced above. During the
submission process you should indicate that the manuscript is for a
special issue, and you will be asked to supply the name of the special
issue, which is: 'Practical Aspects of Search-Based Software
Engineering'.


SEARCH-BASED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Software systems are becoming ever larger and more complex as new
architectures emerge and high-performance hardware becomes increasingly
affordable. However, many of today's approaches to software design and
implementation are unable to scale to meet the challenges presented by such
systems.

For this reason, a recent trend has been to automate tasks within the
software engineering lifecycle using machine-based search. The engineering
task is reformulated as an optimisation problem and solutions are found
using efficient modern optimisation algorithms, such as meta-heuristic
search and operational research (OR) methods. This approach, known as
Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), promises much greater scalability
than traditional labour-intensive methods since human effort is redirected
to guide the search for solutions to the engineering problem, rather than
perform the search itself.

SBSE has been applied across the spectrum of software engineering
activities, including: requirements engineering, project planning, software
task allocation, code refactoring, protocol synthesis, test data
generation, and the design of algorithms for highly resource-constrained
hardware platforms. As the efficacy and scalability of this approach is
established for an increasing number of software engineering problems, a
particular research focus is how to successfully apply SBSE in practice.