In this work, we are interested in assisting the designer in this task. Considering that components, methods and strategies are generally associated with parameters and parameter values, we propose a method able to detect, through a fine-tuning process, ineffective and redundant components/strategies of an algorithm. The approach is a model-free method and applies simple consistency techniques in order to discard values from the domain of the parameters. We validate our approach with two algorithms for solving SAT and MIP problems. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.