Evidence-based software process recovery: A post-doctoral view

Software development processes are often viewed as a panacea for software quality: prescribe a process and a quality project will emerge. Unfortunately this has not been the case, as practitioners are prone to push against processes that they do not perceive as helpful, often much to the dismay of stakeholders such as their managers. Yet practitioners still tend to follow some sort of software development processes regardless of the prescribed processes. Thus if a team wants to recover the software development processes of a project or if team is trying to achieve a certification such as ISO9000 or CMM, the team will be tasked with describing their development processes. Previous research has tended to focus on modifying existing projects in order to extract process related information. In contrast, our approach of software process recovery attempts to analyze software artifacts extracted from software repositories in order to infer the underlying software development processes visible within these software repositories.