Prototyping a process monitoring experiment

Features are often the basic unit of development for very large software systems and represent long-term efforts, spanning several years from inception to actual use. Thus, monitoring these lengthy processes is a long-term effort as well. The authors report on an initial step in the development of an experiment to monitor such processes relating to prototyping the experimental design using a representative process and reconstructed data from a large and rich feature development. This prototyping approach has yielded two interesting sets of results. First, it was found that it was necessary to modify the experimental design. The initial set of states did not represent the data as well as had been hoped. Second, some interesting conjectures were formulated. The conclusion is that the prototyping effort is a necessary part of developing and installing any large-scale process monitoring experiment