Software Process Recovery
When developers create software they leave a trail of artifacts in their wake. These artifacts include source code changes, discussions over electronic mediums, documentation, tests, build scripts, require- ments, etc. We propose to investigate methods in which one can discover and recover the underlying processes that developers follow, by analyzing the artifacts they leave behind. We wish to see if their behaviour that relates to these artifacts correlates with underlying processes developers are following. We also wish to determine if developers are following the processes they claim to be following. Other researchers have approached this problem by tooling the process that the developers are following in order to record more information. By contrast, we want to recover development processes ex post facto, after the fact. We propose to use process recovery to expose, recover and validate the underlying behaviours and processes that developers follow, collaboratively, to build software. We propose an analysis framework to help research process recovery.
See also CSER Keynote, where we discuss software process recovery, a kind of process mining using the after-the-fact analysis of software repositories.