SSBSE 2025
Sun 16 Nov 2025 Seoul, South Korea
co-located with ASE 2025

Building reliable Cyber-physical systems often requires engineers to search for software defects. Search-based software testing (SBST) is a standard technology that supports this activity. To increase practical adoption, industries need empirical evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of (existing) SBST techniques on benchmarks from different domains and of varying complexity. To address this need, this replication study reports on our experience assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of SBST in generating failure-revealing test cases for cyber-physical systems requirements. Our study subject is within the electric bike (e-Bike) domain and concerns the software controller of an e-Bike motor. We assessed the effectiveness and efficiency of HECATE, an SBST framework for Simulink® models, to analyze two software controllers. HECATE successfully identified failure-revealing test cases in practical time. We present the lessons learned, the relevance of our results for industrial applications, and the improvement in the state of practice.