This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, SSBSE 2020, held in Bari, Italy, in October 2020.

The 13 research papers and 5 short papers presented together with 1 keynote were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. SBSE is a research area focused on the formulation of software engineering problems as search problems, and the subsequent use of complex heuristic techniques to attain optimal solutions to such problems. A wealth of engineering challenges - from test generation, to design refactoring, to process organization - can be solved efficiently through the application of automated optimization techniques. SBSE is a growing field - sitting at the crossroads between AI, machine learning, and software engineering - and SBSE techniques have begun to attain human-competitive results. 

Due to the Corona pandemic SSBSE 2020 was held as a virtual event.