Process mining multiple repositories for software defect resolution from control and organizational perspective

Abstract

Issue reporting and resolution is a software engineering process supported by tools such as Issue Tracking System (ITS), Peer Code Review (PCR) system and Version Control System (VCS). Several open source software projects such as Google Chromium and Android follow process in which a defect or feature enhancement request is reported to an issue tracker followed by source-code change or patch review and patch commit using a version control system. We present an application of process mining three software repositories (ITS, PCR and VCS) from control flow and organizational perspective for effective process management. ITS, PCR and VCS are not explicitly linked so we implement regular expression based heuristics to integrate data from three repositories for Google Chromium project. We define activities such as bug reporting, bug fixing, bug verification, patch submission, patch review, and source code commit and create an event log of the bug resolution process. The extracted event log contains audit trail data such as caseID, timestamp, activity name and performer. We discover runtime process model for bug resolution process spanning three repositories using process mining tool, Disco, and conduct process performance and efficiency analysis. We identify bottlenecks, define and detect basic and composite anti-patterns. In addition to control flow analysis, we mine event log to perform organizational analysis and discover metrics such as handover of work, subcontracting, joint cases and joint activities.