@Article{BaleraSant:2019:SyMaAd,
               author = "Balera, Juliana Marino and Santiago J{\'u}nior, Valdivino 
                         Alexandre",
          affiliation = "{Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)} and {Instituto 
                         Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)}",
                title = "A systematic mapping addressing Hyper-Heuristics within 
                         Search-based Software Testing",
              journal = "Information and Software Technology",
                 year = "2019",
               volume = "114",
                pages = "176--189",
                month = "Oct.",
             keywords = "Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms, Hyper-heuristics, 
                         Meta-heuristics, Search-based Software Testing, Systematic 
                         Mapping.",
             abstract = "Context: Search-based Software Testing (SBST) is a research field 
                         where testing a software product is formulated as an optimization 
                         problem. It is an active sub-area of Search-based Software 
                         Engineering (SBSE) where many studies have been published and some 
                         reviews have been carried out. The majority of studies in SBST has 
                         been adopted meta-heuristics while hyper-heuristics have a long 
                         way to go. Moreover, there is still a lack of studies to perceive 
                         the state-of-the-art of the use of hyper-heuristics within SBST. 
                         Objective: The objective of this work is to investigate the 
                         adoption of hyper-heuristics for Software Testing highlighting the 
                         current efforts and identifying new research directions. Method: A 
                         Systematic mapping study was carried out with 5 research questions 
                         considering papers published up to may/2019, and 4 different 
                         bases. The research questions aims to find out, among other 
                         things, what are the hyper-heuristics used in the context of 
                         Software Testing, for what problems hyper-heuristics have been 
                         applied, and what are the objective functions in the scope of 
                         Software Testing. Results: A total of 734 studies were found via 
                         the search strings and 164 articles were related to Software 
                         Testing. However, from these, only 26 papers were actually in 
                         accordance with the scope of this research and 3 more papers were 
                         considered due to snowballing or expert's suggestion, totalizing 
                         29 selected papers. Few different problems and application domains 
                         where hyper-heuristics have been considered were identified. 
                         Conclusion: Differently from other communities (Operational 
                         Research, Artificial Intelligence), SBST has little explored the 
                         benefits of hyper-heuristics which include generalization and less 
                         difficulty in parameterization. Hence, it is important to further 
                         investigate this area in order to alleviate the effort of 
                         practitioners to use such an approach in their testing 
                         activities.",
                  doi = "10.1016/j.infsof.2019.06.012",
                  url = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2019.06.012",
                 issn = "0950-5849",
             language = "en",
           targetfile = "balera_systematic.pdf",
        urlaccessdate = "27 abr. 2024"
}