Detection of Consistent Patterns from Process Enactment Data

Software process improvement has been a focus of industry for many years. To assist with the implementation of process improvement, we provide an approach to recover process enactment data. The goal of our method is to uncover the actual process used and thereby provide evidence for improving the quality of a planned software process that is followed by an organization in the future. The recovered process model (or patterns) is presented at the same level of abstraction as the planned process model. This allows an easy and clear method to identify the distance between a planned process model and the actual project enactment. We investigate the enactment of a defined software process model from the view of understanding the opportunity for process model improvement from the viewpoint of the project managers in the context of a small software development organization. We collected data from one of our collaboration organizations and then applied our method to a case study. The consistencies between a planned process model and the project enactment were measured. The outcomes of our method provide precise information including qualitative and quantitative data to assist project managers with process improvement in future practice. The main contribution of our work is to provide a novel approach to assist software process improvement by recovering a model from process