Search Based Software Maintenance: Methods and Tools

Software evolution is an effort-prone activity, and requires developers to make complex and difficult decisions. This entails the development of automated approaches to support various software evolution-related tasks, for example aimed at suggesting refactoring or remodularization actions. Finding a solution to these problems is intrinsically NP-hard, and exhaustive approaches are not viable due to the size and complexity of many software projects. Therefore, during recent years, several software-evolution problems have been formulated as optimization problems, and resolved with meta-heuristics.