Toward objective software process information: experiences from a case study

Abstract

A critical problem in software development is monitoring, control and improvement in processes of software developers. Software processes are often not explicitly modeled, and manuals to support development work contain abstract guidelines and procedures. Consequently, there are huge differences between `actual' and `official' processes: the actual process is what you do, with all its omissions, mistakes, and oversights. The official process is what book, i.e., a quality manual, says you are supposed to do (Humphrey in A discipline for software engineering. Addison-Wesley, New York, 1995). Software developers lack support to identify, analyze and better understand their processes. Consequently, process improvements are often not based on an in-depth understanding of `actual' processes, but on organization-wide improvement programs or ad hoc initiatives of individual developers. In this paper, we show that, based on particular data from software development projects, underlying software development processes can be extracted and that automatically more realistic process models can be constructed. This is called software process mining (Rubin et al. in Process mining framework for software processes. Software process dynamics and agility. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007). The goal of process mining is to better understand development processes, to compare constructed process models with `official' guidelines and procedures in quality manuals and, subsequently, to improve development processes. This paper reports on process mining case studies in a large industrial company in The Netherlands. The subject of process mining is a particular process: change control board (CCB) process. The results of process mining are fed back to practice in order to subsequently improve CCB process.