Search-based software engineering (SBSE), which integrates metaheuristic search techniques with software engineering, has been an active area of research for about 25 years. It has been applied to solve numerous problems across the entire software engineering lifecycle and has demonstrated its versatility in multiple domains. With recent advances in AI, particularly the emergence of foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs), the evolution of SBSE alongside these models remains undetermined. In this window of opportunity, we present a research roadmap that articulates the current landscape of SBSE in relation to FMs, identifies open challenges, and outlines potential research directions to advance SBSE through its integration and interplay with FMs. Specifically, we analyze five core aspects: leveraging FMs for SBSE design, applying FMs to complement SBSE in SE problems, employing SBSE to address FM challenges, adapting SBSE practices for FMs tailored to SE activities, and exploring the synergistic potential between SBSE and FMs. Furthermore, we present a forward-thinking perspective that envisions the future of SBSE in the era of FMs, highlighting promising research opportunities to address challenges in emerging domains.

With modern requirements, there is an increasing tendancy of considering multiple objectives/criteria simultaneously in many Software Engineering (SE) scenarios. Such a multi-objective optimization scenario comes with an important issue --- how to evaluate the outcome of optimization algorithms, which typically is a set of incomparable solutions (i.e., being Pareto non-dominated to each other). This issue can be challenging for the SE community, particularly for practitioners of Search-Based SE (SBSE). On one hand, multiobjective optimization may still be relatively new to SE/SBSE researchers, who may not be able to identify right evaluation methods for their problems. On the other hand, simply following the evaluation methods for general multiobjective optimisation problems may not be appropriate for specific SE problems, especially when the problem nature or decision maker's preferences are explicitly/implicitly available. This has been well echoed in the literature by various inappropriate/inadequate selection and inaccurate/misleading uses of evaluation methods. In this paper, we carry out a critical review of quality evaluation for multiobjective optimization in SBSE. We survey 717 papers published between 2009 and 2019 from 36 venues in 7 repositories, and select 97 prominent studies, through which we identify five important but overlooked issues in the area. We then conduct an in-depth analysis of quality evaluation indicators and general situations in SBSE, which, together with the identified issues, enables us to provide a methodological guidance to selecting and using evaluation methods in different SBSE scenarios.

Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is a promising paradigm that exploits computational search to optimize different processes when engineering complex software systems. Self-adaptive system (SAS) is one category of such complex systems that permits to optimize different functional and non-functional objectives/criteria under changing environment (e.g., requirements and workload), which involves problems that are subject to search. In this regard, over years, there have been a considerable amount of work that investigates SBSE for SASs. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and comprehensive survey exclusively on SBSE for SASs, covering 3,740 papers in 27 venues from 7 repositories, which eventually leads to several key statistics from the most notable 73 primary studies in this particular field of research. Our results, surprisingly, have revealed five disappointed issues that are of utmost importance, but have been overwhelmingly ignored in existing studies.

Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is a promising paradigm that exploits computational search to optimize different processes when engineering complex software systems. Self-adaptive system (SAS) is one category of such complex systems that permits to optimize different functional and non-functional objectives/criteria under changing environment (e.g., requirements and workload), which involves problems that are subject to search. In this regard, over years, there have been a considerable amount of work that investigates SBSE for SASs. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and comprehensive survey exclusively on SBSE for SASs, covering 3,740 papers in 27 venues from 7 repositories, which eventually leads to several key statistics from the most notable 73 primary studies in this particular field of research. Our results, surprisingly, have revealed five disappointed issues that are of utmost importance, but have been overwhelmingly ignored in existing studies. We provide evidences to justify our arguments against the disappointments and highlight six emergent, but currently under-explored opportunities for future work on SBSE for SASs. By mitigating the disappointed issues revealed in this work, together with the highlighted opportunities, we hope to be able to excite a much more significant growth on this particular research direction.