Abstract: Collective intelligence based software engineering (CISE) aims to solve software engineering problems by techniques that exploit collective intelligence, which includes machine collective intelligence, human collective intelligence, and their combinations. CISE provides a new perspective for solving complex software engineering problems, and has become an important part of modern software development. This paper presents a survey of CISE, which systematically reviews the applications of different collective intelligence inspired techniques on solving problems of software requirements analysis, design, coding, testing and maintenance. Future research directions and challenges in the CISE area are also discussed. The goal of this study is to establish a uniform framework of CISE and provide references for the interactions and transformations between collective intelligence techniques of different levels.

Key words: collective intelligence, software engineering, search based software engineering, crowd-sourced software engineering, survey