The field of software-development effort estimation explores ways of defining effort through prediction approaches. Even though this field has a crucial impact on budgeting and project planning in industry, the number of works classifying and examining currently available approaches is still small. This article, therefore, presents a comprehensive overview of these approaches, and pinpoints research gaps, challenges and trends. A systematic mapping of the literature was designed and performed based on well-established practical guidelines. In total, 120 primary studies were selected, analysed and categorised, after applying a careful filtering process from a sample of 3746 candidate studies to answer six research questions. Over 70% of the selected studies adopted multiple effort estimation approaches; over 45% adopted evaluation research as a research method; over 90% of the participants were students, rather than professionals; most studies had their quality assessed as high, and were most commonly published in journals. Our study benefits practitioners and researchers by providing a body of knowledge about the current literature, serving as a starting point for upcoming studies. This article reports challenges worth investigating, regarding the use of cognitive load and team interaction. 2 Planning This section aims to outline our review protocol. Fig. 1 introduces the adopted systematic mapping process, which is formed by three

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The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the standard for modeling software. Several surveys on the UML usage have been proposed in recent years. However, none of them explores the UML use in specific regional scope, and thus little is known about the practices and perceptions of UML use from the perspective of practitioners in the Brazilian industry. Objective: This paper reports on a survey focused on identifying the state-of-the-practice of the Brazilian industry for what concerns the UML usage in real-world settings. Method: In total, 222 practitioners from 140 different Information Technology companies have answered an on-line (or printed) questionnaire concerning their UML use experiences, the difficulty in adopting UML and what should be done to increase the UML adoption in practice. Result: The results show that: (1) 60 participants (28.2%) have used UML in their daily work, while 73.2% have not; (2) 55.41% of the surveyed participants did not disagree with the statement that UML is the "lingua franca" in software modeling; (3) 61.26% reported to find that the automatic creation of UML diagrams to represent a big picture of the system under development would be useful to boost UML use. Conclusion: The UML is not often used in the work life of participants. In addition, no relationship was identified between the use of UML and the participant company being a software factory.

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