Multimedia in search-based software engineering: challenges and opportunities within a new research domain.

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) is an emerging research sub-area in the field of software engineering. The concept of SBSE is based on the idea of formulation of software engineering problem as a search-based optimization problem and effective exploitation of metaheuristic search optimizers to solve it. The complex nature of software engineering problems and complex computational behaviour of the metaheuristic search algorithms makes the SBSE approaches challenging to understand and analyze. A variety of multimedia technologies are generally used to make the problem formulation and their computational method more understandable and analyzable. Even after wide application of multimedia in science and engineering, the SBSE got little attention in this direction. To explore and exploit the potential of the multimedia in the SBSE, this work first conducted a research study on the current trends of multimedia in SBSE, then based on this study, the various challenges and opportunities are presented. More specifically, our work mainly focusses on current multimedia trends in various forms of SBSE approaches (e.g., single, multi, and many-objective SBSE). Apart from that, we also explore the various opportunities and challenges in SBSE from the perspective of visualization of software artefacts, software quality metrics, problem formulation, search trajectory, Pareto optimal set and front. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]