Search Based Software Engineering: Review and analysis of the field in Brazil

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is the field of software engineering research and practice that applies search based techniques to solve different optimization problems from diverse software engineering areas. SBSE approaches allow software engineers to automatically obtain solutions for complex and labor-intensive tasks, contributing to reduce efforts and costs associated to the software development. The SBSE field is growing rapidly in Brazil. The number of published works and research groups has significantly increased in the last three years and a Brazilian SBSE community is emerging. This is mainly due to the Brazilian Workshop on Search Based Software Engineering (WOES), co-located with the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES). Considering these facts, this paper presents results of a mapping we have performed in order to provide an overview of the SBSE field in Brazil. The main goal is to map the Brazilian SBSE community on SBES by identifying the main researchers, focus of the published works, fora and frequency of publications. The paper also introduces SBSE concerns and discusses trends, challenges, and open research problems to this emergent area. We hope the work serves as a reference to this novel field, contributing to disseminate SBSE and to its consolidation in Brazil.