Distributed Software Development (DSD) has recently evolved, resulting in an increase in the available literature. Organizations now have a tendency to make greater development efforts in more attractive zones. The main advantage of this lies in a greater availability of human resources in decentralized zones at less cost. There are, however, some disadvantages which are caused by the distance that separates the development teams. Coordination and communication become more difficult as the software components are sourced from different places, thus affecting project organization, project control, and product quality. New processes and tools are consequently necessary. This work presents the findings of a systematic review of the literature related to the challenges concerning Distributed Software Development, whose purpose is to identify the solutions and improvements proposed up to the present day.

Software engineering involves people collaborating to develop better software. Collaboration is challenging, especially across time zones and without face-to-face meetings. We therefore use collaboration tools all along the product life cycle to let us work together, stay together, and achieve results together. A survey of current collaborative development tools and environments summarizes their features and development trends

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Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15%). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

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Different proposals exist to represent the software maintenance process. However most of them are very informal or too focussed on a specific goal. We have developed a semi-formal ontology where the main concepts, according to the literature related to software maintenance, have been described. This ontology, besides representing static aspects, also represents dynamic issues related to the management of software maintenance projects. In order to develop an ontology a suitable methodology should also be followed. REFSENO was the methodology used in this work. The ontology that this work presents is not a preliminary idea but it has already been used in software maintenance environments, such as MANTIS, which is currently working successfully.