Search based software engineering for software product line engineering: a survey and directions for future work

This paper1 presents a survey of work on Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) for Software Product Lines (SPLs). We have attempted to be comprehensive, in the sense that we have sought to include all papers that ap-ply computational search techniques to problems in software product line engineering. Having surveyed the recent explo-sion in SBSE for SPL research activity, we highlight some di-rections for future work. We focus on suggestions for the de-velopment of recent advances in genetic improvement, show-ing how these might be exploited by SPL researchers and practitioners: Genetic improvement may grow new prod-ucts with new functional and non-functional features and graft these into SPLs. It may also merge and parameterise multiple branches to cope with SPL branchmania