Title
Using evolutionary computation to shed light on the effect of scale and complexity on object-oriented software design
Abstract
Early lifecycle software design is an intensely human activity in which design scale and complexity can place a high cognitive load on the software designer. Recently, the use of evolutionary search has been suggested to yield insights in the nature of software engineering problems generally, and so we have applied dynamic evolutionary computation using self-adaptive mutation to the object-oriented software design search space. Using three design problem instances of varying scale and complexity, initial investigations of the discrete search landscape reveal a redundancy in genotype-to-phenotype mapping enabling flexible and effective exploration. In further experiments, mutation probabilities and population diversity are observed to significantly increase in the face of increasing problem scale, but not for increasing complexity (in problems of the same scale). Based on these findings, we conclude that design problem scale rather than complexity has an effect on the software design process, emphasizing the role of decomposition as a design technique.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/SMC.2014.6973947
Systems, Man and Cybernetics
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
computational complexity,evolutionary computation,object-oriented methods,probability,software engineering,cognitive load,complexity effect,dynamic evolutionary computation,early lifecycle software design,genotype-to-phenotype mapping,mutation probabilities,object-oriented software design search space,population diversity,scale effect,software engineering problems,evolutionary computation,software design
Conference
1062-922X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.41
4
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christopher L. Simons1335.13
Jim Smith215211.63