Abstract
Research communities evolve over time, changing their interests for specific problems or research areas. Mapping the evolution of a research community, including the most frequently addressed problems, the strategies selected to propose solution for them, the venues on which results observed from applying these strategies are published, and the collaboration among distinct groups may provide lessons on actions that can positively influence the growth of research in a given field. To this end, this paper presents an analysis of the Brazilian SBSE research community. We present our major research groups focusing on the field, the software engineering problems most addressed by them, the search techniques most frequently used to solve these problems, and an analysis of our publications and collaboration. We could conclude that the Brazilian community is still expanding, both geographically and in terms of publications, and that the creation of a national workshop focusing on the research field was a keystone to allow this growth.
Highlights
In the technical literature, we find studies that report an increasing number of works and diversity of addressed Software Engineering (SE) areas in the Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) field (Harman et al 2009)
We observe a growing number of works in this field, reporting the use of such algorithms for software bug fixing (Emer et al 2002), project management (Barreto et al 2008; Braz and Vergilio 2004), process composition (Magdaleno 2010), refactoring, software slicing and comprehension (Harman 2007b), cloud engineering (Harman et al 2012b), software repair (Goues et al 2013), reverse engineering (Harman et al 2013), and so on. Some of the former areas already have surveys and systematic reviews consolidating the works performed by researchers in their subfield, among them software testing (Afzal et al 2009; Yoo and Harman 2012), software design (Räihä 2010) and software requirements (Zhang et al 2008; Pitangueira et al 2013). Considering this interest, a great number of SBSE surveys have been published as bibliometrics analysis, mapping studies, or systematic literature reviews
Source When considering the venue where those SBSE works have been published, the analysis showed that around 75% (74 papers) of the publications were published in conference proceedings, with 20 articles (20.04%) in journals, 2 posters (2.04%), 1 (1.02%) book chapter and 1 (1.94%) technical report
Summary
We find studies that report an increasing number of works and diversity of addressed Software Engineering (SE) areas in the Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) field (Harman et al 2009). Brazil has gained international attention due to hosting large scale events, such as 2016 Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup 2014, and has attracted investments from different sources This growing interest and the increasing number of Brazilian works in the SBSE field serve as motivation to this paper, which presents the SBSE Brazilian community and maps its production. This mapping aims to answer two main research questions. This question allows the identification of existing groups: institutions and regions of the country; addressed SE areas; search-based techniques used; and number of researchers; RQ2: How is the production of the Brazilian community? The collected data are analyzed to answer, respectively, the research questions RQ1 and RQ2
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