Using Constraint Mining to Analyze Software Development Processes

Most software development organizations nowadays use issue-tracking tools to manage software processes throughout the life-cycle. Still, understanding development processes, keeping track of process execution, and reacting to deviations in projects remains challenging. In particular, the actual process usually differs from the process perceived by developers, making it hard to define the processes developers are expected to carry out. This is further challenged by frequently changing processes and process variations in different projects and teams. In this paper we describe an empirical study in which we applied a constraint mining approach from the field of software monitoring to automatically extract process definitions in the form of constraints. Specifically, we applied the approach to datasets extracted from four real-world projects (using the Jira issue-tracking tool) in a company developing a recreational activities platform. The mined constraints describe the boundaries of the actual processes and thus help to understand process behavior. Constraints can be frequently re-mined to understand process evolution. The mined constraints can also be used to monitor future processes to detect problems in the development process early on. We involved a domain expert to evaluate the usefulness of our results and investigated to what extent the mined constraints reflect the official development process of the company. We also report mining results for different issue types, across projects, and over different time windows.