DAASE: Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering

当前的软件开发过程昂贵、费力且容易出错。它们实现适应性的速度非常缓慢，主要是通过大量的人力，迫使高技能的工程师浪费大量时间来适应许多繁琐的实现细节。通常，最终的软件同样不灵活，迫使用户也依赖于他们天生的人类适应性来寻找“变通方法”。正如来自DAASE工业合作伙伴的支持信所表明的那样，这产生了对更大自动化和适应性的迫切需求。假设我们使用计算搜索将大部分开发过程自动化。需求工程、项目计划和测试现在统一为一个自动化的活动。随着需求的变化，项目计划和相关的测试被调整为最适合这些变化。现在假设我们进一步将这种适应性嵌入到软件产品本身中。对操作环境的较小更改现在可以自动处理。从操作环境到开发过程的反馈也将加速软件产品和过程对更大的变化的适应，这些变化不能由这种原位适应来处理。这是DAASE试图创建的软件工程的新方法。它将计算搜索置于它所创建的流程和产品的核心，并在两者中嵌入适应性。DAASE还将为一种新的软件工程创造一系列新的过程、方法、技术和工具，从根本上改变软件工程的理论和实践。DAASE将开发一种超启发式的自适应自动化方法。超启发式是一种选择或生成启发式的方法。文献中的大多数启发式方法都是在特定问题的潜在解决方案的搜索空间上操作的。然而，超启发式在启发式的搜索空间上操作。我们没有低估这一研究议程所带来的挑战。然而，我们相信我们有团队、合作伙伴和项目计划来实现这一雄心勃勃的目标。DAASE集成了来自运筹学和基于搜索的软件工程社区的两个研究团队。这两组研究人员被广泛认为是世界领先的，他们开创了超启发式和基于搜索的软件工程（SBSE）领域；这是DAASE结合在一起的两个关键字段。

Current software development processes are expensive, laborious and error prone. They achieve adaptivity at only a glacial pace, largely through enormous human effort, forcing highly skilled engineers to waste significant time adapting many tedious implementation details. Often, the resulting software is equally inflexible, forcing users to also rely on their innate human adaptivity to find "workarounds". As the letters of support from the DAASE industrial partners demonstrate, this creates a pressing need for greater automation and adaptivity.Suppose we automate large parts of the development process using computational search. Requirements engineering, project planning and testing now become unified into a single automated activity. As requirements change, the project plans and associated tests are adapted to best suit the changes. Now suppose we further embed this adaptivity within the software product itself. Smaller changes to the operating environment can now be handled automatically. Feedback from the operating environment to the development process will also speed adaption of both the software product and process to much larger changes that cannot be handled by such in-situ adaptation.This is the new approach to software engineering DAASE seeks to create. It places computational search at the heart of the processes and products it creates and embeds adaptivity into both. DAASE will also create an array of new processes, methods, techniques and tools for a new kind of software engineering, radically transforming the theory and practice of software engineering. DAASE will develop a hyper-heuristic approach to adaptive automation. A hyper-heuristic is a methodology for selecting or generating heuristics. Most heuristic methods in the literature operate on a search space of potential solutions to a particular problem. However, a hyper-heuristic operates on a search space of heuristics. We do not underestimate the challenges this research agenda poses. However, we believe we have the team, partners and programme plan that will achieve the ambitious aim. DAASE integrates two teams of researchers from the Operational Research and Search Based Software Engineering communities. Both groups of researchers are widely regarded as world leading, having pioneered the fields of Hyper-Heuristics and Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE); the two key fields that DAASE brings together.