This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, SSBSE 2016, held in Raleigh, NC, USA, in October 2016.The 13 revised full papers and 4 short papers presented together with 7 challenge track and 4 graduate student track papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) studies the application of meta-heuristic optimization techniques to various software engineering problems, ranging from requirements engineering to software testing and maintenance.