A new perspective on Process-oriented Software Engineering based on BPMN Process Mining

Nowadays, the quality of an IT product/service is increasingly based on the development process, not only on development costs and on time. This trend fosters the software process quality certification, focusing on the entire life cycle, and the adoption of agile software development processes, which rely on a self-organizing culture for creating tailored products. In parallel, the business of IT companies is evolving into a “software factory” model, to increase productivity and reduce development costs. Accordingly, the development of a software project is distributed among different factories, depending on their specialties and workload. This highly industrialized development process requires appropriate methods for management control and accountability. Different factories, and different project managers in the same factory, may adopt different software development processes, and a number of factors may disrupt the process execution. In the software production domain, there is a large availability of systems recording audit trails about process execution. A fundamental challenge is to assess from audit trails if an IT solution is developed through the appropriate procedures, as well as to discover the procedures actually adopted without imposing any management practice. In this study, we adopt Process Mining techniques based on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) for the automatic discovery of the software development processes. Our approach can be used to measure the alignment of people and processes, to investigate causes of disruption, as well as to generate a process model from audit trails. The paper illustrates the proposed techniques and discusses their application through a pilot real-world case study.