A Systematic Approach to Process Enactment Analysis as Input to Software Process Improvement or Tailoring

Software process improvement has been a focus of industry for many years. To assist the procedure and implementation of process improvement we provide a software process recovery method based on mining project enactment data. The goal of the method is to uncover the actual process used in order to provide input to improve the quality of a defined software process. The recovered model (or patterns) is at the same level of abstraction as the predefined process model. This provides an easy and clear way to identify the gap between the planned process model and the real enactment. We investigate the enactment of a defined 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 data from organizations and applied our method to a pilot case study. The main contribution of our work is to provide a software process model recovery method which supports software process change and improvement.