Supporting software maintenance in web repositories through a multi-agent system

Software Maintenance (SM) is a knowledge-intensive activity. A suitable management of this knowledge could decrease the high costs (economic and in effort) of software maintenance tasks. The challenge of managing this knowledge increases as the distributed development of software becomes more popular, and developers as well as knowledge are distributed worldwide. Increasingly web repositories are being used for the coordination of development tasks among software and maintenance engineers. Thus, an appropriate technical solution to this problem should be based on a web architecture and associated protocols. On the other hand, in order to work with all the concepts related to SM is advisable to establish different levels of abstraction, thus the complexity of the concepts, and their management, are simplified. This work presents a system that, by storing information in XMI documents, manages the data and metadata generated during SM, facilitating the work of SM engineers.