Process mining software repositories from student projects in an undergraduate software engineering course

Abstract

An undergraduate level Software Engineering courses generally consists of a team-based semester long project and emphasizes on both technical and managerial skills. Software Engineering is a practice-oriented and applied discipline and hence there is an emphasis on hands-on development, process, usage of tools in addition to theory and basic concepts. We present an approach for mining the process data (process mining) from software repositories archiving data generated as a result of constructing software by student teams in an educational setting. We present an application of mining three software repositories: team wiki (used during requirement engineering), version control system (development and maintenance) and issue tracking system (corrective and adaptive maintenance) in the context of an undergraduate Software Engineering course. We propose visualizations, metrics and algorithms to provide an insight into practices and procedures followed during various phases of a software development life-cycle. The proposed visualizations and metrics (learning analytics) provide a multi-faceted view to the instructor serving as a feedback tool on development process and quality by students. We mine the event logs produced by software repositories and derive insights such as degree of individual contributions in a team, quality of commit messages, intensity and consistency of commit activities, bug fixing process trend and quality, component and developer entropy, process compliance and verification. We present our empirical analysis on a software repository dataset consisting of 19 teams of 5 members each and discuss challenges, limitations and recommendations.