Interactive, evolutionary search in upstream Object-oriented class design

Parmee, Ian C.; Simons, Chris; Gwynllyw, Rhys

Abstract

Although much evidence exists to suggest that early life cycle software engineering design is a difficult task for software engineers to perform, current computational tool support for software engineers is limited. To address this limitation, interactive search-based approaches using evolutionary computation and software agents are investigated in experimental upstream design episodes for two example design domains. Results show that interactive evolutionary search, supported by software agents, appears highly promising. As an open system, search is steered jointly by designer preferences and software agents. Directly traceable to the design problem domain, a mass of useful and interesting class designs is arrived at which may be visualized by the designer with quantitative measures of structural integrity, such as design coupling and class cohesion. The class designs are found to be of equivalent or better coupling and cohesion when compared to a manual class design for the example design domains, and by exploiting concurrent execution, the runtime performance of the software agents is highly favorable. © 2010 IEEE.

Citation

Parmee, I. C., Simons, C., & Gwynllyw, R. (2010). Interactive, evolutionary search in upstream Object-oriented class design. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 36(6), 798-816. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.34

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jul 19, 2010
• Deposit Date: Jan 10, 2011
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• Print ISSN: 0098-5589
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 36
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 798-816
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.34
• Keywords: software design, evolutionary computation, interactive search
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/974023
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.34