Assigning Software Change Requests to Developers

The efficient management of Change Requests (CRs) is fundamental for successful software maintenance; however the assignment of CRs to developers is an expensive aspect in this regard, due to the time and expertise demanded. To overcome this, researchers have proposed automated approaches for CR assignment. Although these proposals present advances to this topic, they do not consider many factors inherent to the assignments, such as: developers’ workload, CRs severity, interpersonal relationships, and developers know-how. Actually, as we demonstrate in this work, CR assignment is a complex activity and automated approaches cannot rely on simplistic solutions. Ideally, it is necessary to consider and reason over contextual information in order to provide an effective automation. Beyond investigating all these aspects through an extensive systematic literature review, this work also proposes a context-aware architecture solution to semi-automated assignment of CRs.