In 2001 I founded the field of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), building on the EPSRC SEMINAL network that I led from 1999 to 2002 and currently funded by the £2.7M EPSRC SEBASE project which I lead. The SBSE movement provides a fresh angle on Software Engineering, that is complementary to existing approaches. According to SBSE, the problems faced by software engineers are reformulated as search based optimization problems. This approach is now becoming widespread in Software Engineering research (and finding its way into practice too), but when first proposed I found that it was regarded as very radical, even heretical.

Since 2001 there has been a rapid rise of research and practice in SBSE. There is now active research in 25 countries, across all continents of the globe (except Antarctica). In the UK alone, there are active researchers and practitioners of SBSE in at least 20 organisations (including both companies and universities). I have given many keynotes at refereed conferences on the topic of SBSE and also gave a ‘Future of Software Engineering’ talk and invited paper at ICSE 2007. My work on SBSE is being used increasingly in industry, and is currently used by many, including Ericsson, Motorola, Microsoft, Google and IBM.

I am also known for work on source code analysis and testing. In 1997 I introduced Amorphous Slicing, a way of reducing program size by focussing upon a point of interest within a program. Amorphous slicing has been studied and developed by many universities and research institutes and has been incorporated into industrial tools. The work originated in the EPSRC project GUSTT for which I was the PI and which was rated outstanding on completion. Work on amorphous slicing has since been funded by other bodies and companies including the NSF in the USA. Between 2002 and 2004 I developed the theory and practice of Testability Transformation, a method for improving software testing by transforming the system under test. My work on Testability Transformation was funded by the EPSRC project of the same name which I led and which was ranked number one by the panel that considered it. It was also funded by two development grants from DaimlerChrysler in Berlin. This work is now being developed by several academic and industrial sites in Europe, the USA and the Far East. The work also led to the development of the Vada variable dependence analysis tool, which as used by DaimlerChrysler and others in the optimization of their software testing process. I have given invited keynotes on Testability Transformation in 2007, 2008 and 2011.