Detection of consistent patterns from process enactment data

  • Authors:

  • Ming Huo;He Zhang;Ross Jeffery

  • Affiliations:

  • National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ICSP'08 Proceedings of the Software process, 2008 international conference on Making globally distributed software development a success story
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Software process improvement has been a focus of industry for manyyears. To assist with the implementation of process improvement, we provide anapproach to recover process enactment data. The goal of our method is to uncoverthe actual process used and thereby provide evidence for improving thequality of a planned software process that is followed by an organization in thefuture. The recovered process model (or patterns) is presented at the same levelof abstraction as the planned process model. This allows an easy and clearmethod to identify the distance between a planned process model and the actualproject enactment. We investigate the enactment of a defined software processmodel from the view of understanding the opportunity for process model improvementfrom the viewpoint of the project managers in the context of a smallsoftware development organization. We collected data from one of our collaborationorganizations and then applied our method to a case study. The consistenciesbetween a planned process model and the project enactment were measured.The outcomes of our method provide precise information including qualitativeand quantitative data to assist project managers with process improvement in futurepractice. The main contribution of our work is to provide a novel approachto assist software process improvement by recovering a model from processenactment data.