Software Development Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance Checking and Enhancement

Software development has become a fundamental process on any business or organization. As a consequence, together with other emergent technologies, new development platforms (IDEs) are being created, mainly in the cloud (e.g., Eclipse Orion, Cloud9, Codio), requiring different approaches on the way software development can be studied. Empirical studies on software development most often are based on data taken from software configuration management repositories, source code management systems and issue tracking tools, but not from the IDEs themselves, because they do not record data publically regarding developers’ activities. We aim to bring forward new insights on the software development process by analyzing how developers use their IDE. Based upon process mining techniques such as process discovery and conformance checking, this missing perspective will hopefully allow the discovery of coding patterns, the search for programmer behaviors and the detection of deviations from prescribed processes. Finally, we expect to provide advice for individual software process enhancement.