A Preliminary Systematic Mapping Study of Human Competitiveness of SBSE

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) seeks to reformulate Software Engineering complex problems as search problems to be, hereafter, optimized through the usage of artificial intelligence techniques. As pointed out by Harman in 2007, in his seminal paper about the current state and future of SBSE, it would be very attractive to have convincing examples of human competitive results in order to champion the field. A landmark effort in this direction was made by Souza and others, in the paper titled “The Human Competitiveness of Search Based Software Engineering”, published at SSBSE’2010, voted by the SBSE community as the most influential paper of the past editions in the 10th anniversary of the SSBSE, in 2018. This paper presents a preliminary systematic mapping study to provide an overview of the current state of human competitiveness of SBSE, carried out via a snowball reading of Souza’s paper. The analyses of the 29 selected papers showed a growing interest in this topic, especially since 2010. Seven of those papers presented relevant experimental results, thus demonstrating the human competitiveness of results produced by SBSE approaches.