Metaheuristic techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search have found wide application in most areas of engineering. These techniques have also been applied in business, financial and economic modelling. Metaheuristics have been applied to three areas of software engineering: test data generation, module clustering and cost/effort prediction, yet there remain many software engineering problems which have yet to be tackled using metaheuristics. It is surprising that metaheuristics have not been more widely applied to software engineering; many problems in software engineering are characterised by precisely the features which make metaheuristics search applicable. In the paper it is argued that the features which make metaheuristics applicable for engineering and business applications outside software engineering also suggest that there is great potential for the exploitation of metaheuristics within software engineering. The paper briefly reviews the principal metaheuristic search techniques and surveys existing work on the application of metaheuristics to the three software engineering areas of test data generation, module clustering and cost/effort prediction. It also shows how metaheuristic search techniques can be applied to three additional areas of software engineering: maintenance/evolution system integration and requirements scheduling. The software engineering problem areas considered thus span the range of the software development process, from initial planning, cost estimation and requirements analysis through to integration, maintenance and evolution of legacy systems. The aim is to justify the claim that many problems in software engineering can be reformulated as search problems, to which metaheuristic techniques can be applied. The goal of the paper is to stimulate greater interest in metaheuristic search as a tool of optimisation of software engineering problems and to encourage the investigation and exploitation of these technologies in finding near optimal solutions to the complex constraint-based scenarios which arise so frequently in software engineering

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Imbalanced data is a common problem in data mining when dealing with classification problems, where samples of a class vastly outnumber other classes. In this situation, many data mining algorithms generate poor models as they try to optimize the overall accuracy and perform badly in classes with very few samples. Software Engineering data in general and defect prediction datasets are not an exception and in this paper, we compare different approaches, namely sampling, cost-sensitive, ensemble and hybrid approaches to the problem of defect prediction with different datasets preprocessed differently. We have used the well-known NASA datasets curated by Shepperd et al. There are differences in the results depending on the characteristics of the dataset and the evaluation metrics, especially if duplicates and inconsistencies are removed as a preprocessing step.Further Results and replication package:

This paper presents a tabu search metaheuristic algorithm for the automatic generation of structural software tests. It is a novel work since tabu search is applied to the automation of the test generation task, whereas previous works have used other techniques such as genetic algorithms. The developed test generator has a cost function for intensifying the search and another for diversifying the search that is used when the intensification is not successful. It also combines the use of memory with a backtracking process to avoid getting stuck in local minima. Evaluation of the generator was performed using complex programs under test and large ranges for input variables.Results show that the developed generator is both effective and efficient.