The 8th edition of the BElgian-NEtherlands software eVOLution seminar (BENEVOL 2009) will take place at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. This two-day seminar will be held on Thursday 17 and Friday 18 December 2009. The aim of the seminar is to bring together researchers from Belgium, The Netherlands and neighbouring countries to identify and discuss important principles, problems, techniques and results related to software evolution research and practice.

This year's BENEVOL event will be part of a three-day “Joint MoVES Verification and Evolution Seminar”. BENEVOL participants will have the possibility to attend the first day of this joint seminar, on Wednesday 16 December, which will focus on software and model verification.

Prof. Mark Harman
King's College London

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is an approach to software engineering in which search based optimization algorithms are used to identify optimal or near optimal solutions and to yield insight. Classical optimization techniques are also increasingly used. SBSE techniques can cater for multiple, possibly completing objectives and/or constraints and applications where the potential solution space is large and complex. This is often precisely the situation faced by those seeking to understand, support and improve the process of software evolution and its products. This talk will provide a brief overview of SBSE, explaining some of the ways in which it has already been applied to software evolution. The talk also outlines some possible future applications, open problems and challenges for the further application of SBSE to software evolution.

Short Biography:
Mark Harman is professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at King's College London. He is widely known for work on source code analysis and testing and he was instrumental in the founding of the field of Search Based Software Engineering, a field that currently has active researchers in 24 countries and for which he has given 14 keynote invited talks. Professor Harman is the author of over 150 refereed publications, on the editorial board of 7 international journals and has served on 90 programme committees. He is director of the CREST centre at King's College London. More details are available from the CREST website