Search Based Approaches to Component Selection and Prioritization for the Next Release Problem

This paper addresses the problem of determining the next set of releases in the course of software evolution. It formulates both ranking and selection of candidate software components as a series of feature subset selection problems to which search based software engineering can be applied. The approach is automated using greedy and simulated annealing algorithms and evaluated using a set of software components from the component base of a large telecommunications organization. The results are compared to those obtained by a panel of (human) experts. The results show that the two automated approaches convincingly outperform the expert judgment approach