Genetic Improvement: A New Automated Software Improvement Technique

Genetic Improvement (GI) is a search-based software engineering technique that uses evolutionary computation to automatically find and apply patches to existing software systems. It focuses on improving software performance, reliability, and security by evolving the existing codebase using genetic algorithms. The approach involves creating a population of mutated versions of the original code, testing these variants, and selecting the best-performing ones to create new generations, ultimately leading to improved software.