Software development is a complex activity, which depends on diverse technologies as well as expertise in applying them. Approaches to developing software depend highly on these different characteristics and also the context in which the developers operate. This context involves a massive amount of knowledge, which can often be reused but is easily lost if not captured explicitly and properly organized. Although extensively researched, this context for software development is still not explicit, nor provided as a framework that broadly supports the situation surrounding the software developers and the tools being used. Thus, the ability to reuse this rich context throughout a project is severely hampered. This paper provides a literature review of documents describing the context for software development in traditional and big data projects and a preliminary context-augmented framework design. The purpose of this review is to make the context discovered by the project’s software developers explicit and supported by a framework that aids software development using context information. We believe supporting contextual knowledge through its representation and mining for recommendation and real-time provision can significantly improve traditional and big data software project development.