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In Software Product Lines (SPL), where a greater variety of products are derived from a common platform and constantly changed and evolved, it is important to manage the SPL variability and the traceability among its artifacts. This paper presents a metamodel which aims to coordinate SPL activities, by managing different SPL phases and their responsibles, and to maintain the traceability and variability among different artifacts. The metamodel was built for a SPL project in a private company working in the medical information management domain, which includes four products encompassing 102 different modules and 840 features. The metamodel is divided into five sub-models: project and risk management, scoping, requirements and testing. It is represented in the UML notation. Organizations using this metamodel as basis for their approaches, can easily understand the relationships between the SPL assets, communicate to the stakeholders, and facilitate the evolution and maintenance of the SPL. The metamodel can also be adapted to the single system development context.

Duplicate bug report entries in bug trackers have a negative impact on software maintenance and evolution. This is due, among other factors, to the increased time spent on report analysis and validation, which in some cases takes over 20 min. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost in duplicate bug report analysis. In order to understand the possible factors that cause bug report duplication and its impact on software development, this paper presents an exploratory study in which bug tracking data from private and open source projects were analyzed. The results show, for example, that all projects we investigated had duplicate bug reports and a considerable amount of time was wasted by this duplication. Furthermore, features such as project lifetime, staff size, and the number of bug reports do not seem to be significant factors for duplication, while others, such as

Software maintenance starts as soon as the first artifacts are delivered and is essential for the success of the software. However, keeping maintenance activities and their related artifacts on track comes at a high cost. In this respect, change request (CR) repositories are fundamental in software maintenance. They facilitate the management of CRs and are also the central point to coordinate activities and communication among stakeholders. However, the benefits of CR repositories do not come without issues, and commonly occurring ones should be dealt with, such as the following: duplicate CRs, the large number of CRs to assign, or poorly described CRs. Such issues have led researchers to an increased interest in investigating CR repositories, by considering different aspects of software development and CR management. In this paper, we performed a systematic mapping study to characterize this research field. We analyzed 142 studies, which we classified in two ways. First, we classified the studies into different topics and grouped them into two dimensions: challenges and opportunities. Second, the challenge topics were classified in accordance with an existing taxonomy for information retrieval models. In addition, we investigated tools and services for CR management, to understand whether and how they addressed the topics identified.

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Change Requests (CRs) are key elements to software maintenance and evolution. Finding the appropriate developer to a CR is crucial for obtaining the lowest, economically feasible, fixing time. Nevertheless, assigning CRs is a laborintensive and time consuming task. In this paper, we present a semi-automated CR assignment approach which combines rule-based and information retrieval techniques. The approach emphasizes the use of contextual information, essential to effective assignments, and puts the development team in control of the assignment rules, toward making its adoption easier. Results of an empirical evaluation showed that the approach is up to 46,5% more accurate than approaches which rely solely on machine learning techniques.