An exploratory study on usage of process mining in agile software development

Abstract

Agile software development methods have become popular in the software development field during the last decade. Majority of software organizations develop or claim to develop software based on agile methods. Process mining is a process management technique that allows for the analysis of business processes based on the event logs. The aim of process mining is to discover, monitor and improve real processes, but not assumed processes, by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in information systems. Process mining can be used to discover agile processes followed in organizations/projects to determine the actual processes followed. Process mining can also establish the necessary evidences for assessing or measuring the agility of organizations. This study explores the usability of process mining methods in agile software development context. The results of an exploratory case study on using process mining techniques in a software project managed by Scrum are depicted. We also discuss the benefits of the process mining techniques used and compare different tools utilized.