An exploratory study of process enactment as input to software process improvement

Software process improvement has been a focus of industry for many years. To assist the procedure and implementation of software process improvement we provide a software process recovery method based on mining project enactment data. The goal of process recovery is to improve the quality of a planned software process. We investigate the enactment of a planned software process from the view of understanding the appropriateness and fitness for purpose of the process model from the viewpoint of the project managers in the context of a small software development organization. We collected empirical data from this organization and then applied our method to a pilot case study. The main contribution of our work is to provide a methodology of software process model recovery which supports software process improvement.