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[Context and motivation] A key requirements consideration in software development is the system’s quality requirements. Quality is usually defined in terms of global properties for a software system, such as “reliability”, “usability” and “maintainability”. In the context of software maintenance they are particularly relevant: maintenance activities are performed to ensure software quality. [Question/problem] Recently an expanded view of RE has been emerging, wherein requirements artifacts play a role throughout a system’s lifecycle. How important are quality requirements as the lifecycle progresses? We examine two questions: whether requirements are discussed more as the software matures; secondly, whether different software projects have similar levels of interest about quality requirements. [Principal ideas/results] We use a software repository mining technique we call signifier extraction, and …