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Metaheuristic techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search have found wide application in most areas of engineering. These techniques have also been applied in business, financial and economic modelling. Metaheuristics have been applied to three areas of software engineering: test data generation, module clustering and cost/effort prediction, yet there remain many software engineering problems which have yet to be tackled using metaheuristics. It is surprising that metaheuristics have not been more widely applied to software engineering; many problems in software engineering are characterised by precisely the features which make metaheuristics search applicable. In the paper it is argued that the features which make metaheuristics applicable for engineering and business applications outside software engineering also suggest that there is great potential for the exploitation …