Process Mining Software Repositories

Software developers’ activities are in general recorded in software repositories such as version control systems, bug trackers and mail archives. While abundant information is usually present in such repositories, successful information extraction is often challenged by the necessity to simultaneously analyze different repositories and to combine the information obtained. We propose to apply process mining techniques, originally developed for business process analysis, to address this challenge. However, in order for process mining to become applicable, different software repositories should be combined, and “related” software development events should be matched: e.g., mails sent about a file, modifications of the file and bug reports that can be traced back to it. The combination and matching of events has been implemented in FRASR (Framework for Analyzing Software Repositories), augmenting the process mining framework ProM. FRASR has been successfully applied in a series of case studies addressing such aspects of the development process as roles of different developers and the way bug reports are handled.