What Requirements Engineering can Learn from Process Mining

Process Mining is an approach that uses event logs of systems or processes and turns them into valuable insights. The main characteristic of process mining techniques is that they focus on and exploit "real behavior" of a large number of stakeholders of a system or of a process. On the other hand, requirements engineering is concerned with requirements elicitation and analysis not only in terms of software specifications but also in terms of activities carried out within an organizational and social context. Furthermore, involving a large number of users/stakeholders has always been a challenge with traditional requirements engineering methods. Although both requirements engineering and process mining have gained increasing research attention, the synergy between these two domains is yet to be exploited. Such a synergy can help both domains benefit from their capabilities and mitigate their own challenges. The ability of process mining to exploit huge data logs can help requirements engineers cope with the above challenge. This paper aims to highlight how requirements engineering can benefit from process mining's components such as execution logs, process discovery and conformance techniques for requirements elicitation, prioritization and validation.