A foundational study on the applicability of genetic algorithm to software engineering problems

Many problems in software engineering (SE) can be formulated as optimization problems. Genetic algorithm (GA) is one of the more effective tools for solving such optimization problems and has attracted the attention of SE researchers in recent years. However, there is a general lack of sound support theory to help SE researchers investigate the applicability of GA to certain classes of SE problems. Without such a theory, numerous attempts to conduct a wide spectrum of experiments for solution validation appear to be ad hoc and the results are often difficult to generalize. This paper reports a foundational study to develop such a support theory. Some preliminary results are also given.