Applicability of Process Discovery Algorithms for Software Organizations

Process modeling is one of the most significant tasks software process improvement teams perform. Conventionally modeling is performed by teams composed of domain experts and process engineers and it takes considerable effort and time. In recent years there have been studies which use the data extracted from the actual events that took place to determine process models. In this paper we present the results of a case study we conducted to determine the effectiveness of four process discovery and process mining algorithms. After applying process discovery algorithms we compare the results by the actual process and process definitions. We discuss the discrepancies between the actual flow and the process definitions, and the weaknesses and strong aspects of the algorithms.