How Can Metaheuristics Help Software Engineers?

Among the many fields of interest appearing in recent years, research in search based software engineering (SBSE) seems to have a very large potential. The base idea of modeling software engineering problems as optimization or search tasks opens the door to the utilization of a vast set of solvers. These techniques have been there around in Computer Science from its very beginning, since searching and optimizing are in the core of almost every aspect of life, and for sure in any sort of engineering application.