- author = "Saemundur Oskar Haraldsson",
- title = "Genetic Improvement of Software: From Program Landscapes to the Automatic Improvement of a Live System",
- school = "Institute of Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling",
- year = "2017",
- address = "UK",
- month = may,
- keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, genetic improvement, software Engineering, SBSE, Automatic Programming, Bug fixing, APR, Python",
-
URL = "
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/26007",
-
URL = "https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.725136",
-
URL = "
https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/26007/1/thesis.pdf",
- size = "171 pages",
-
abstract = "In today's technology driven society, software is
becoming increasingly important in more areas of our
lives. The domain of software extends beyond the
obvious domain of computers, tablets, and mobile
phones. Smart devices and the internet-of-things have
inspired the integration of digital and computational
technology into objects that some of us would never
have guessed could be possible or even necessary.
Fridges and freezers connected to social media sites, a
toaster activated with a mobile phone, physical buttons
for shopping, and verbally asking smart speakers to
order a meal to be delivered. This is the world we live
in and it is an exciting time for software engineers
and computer scientists. The sheer volume of code that
is currently in use has long since outgrown beyond the
point of any hope for proper manual maintenance. The
rate of which mobile application stores such as
Google's and Apple's have expanded is astounding.
The research presented here aims to shed a light on an emerging field of research, called Genetic Improvement ( GI ) of software. It is a methodology to change program code to improve existing software. This thesis details a framework for GI that is then applied to explore fitness landscape of bug fixing Python software, reduce execution time in a C++ program, and integrated into a live system.
We show that software is generally not fragile and although fitness landscapes for GI are flat they are not impossible to search in. This conclusion applies equally to bug fixing in small programs as well as execution time improvements. The framework's application is shown to be transportable between programming languages with minimal effort. Additionally, it can be easily integrated into a system that runs a live web service.",
- notes = "ISNI: 0000 0004 6422 5524 Supervisor John R. Woodward gismo",
