Identifying Software Process Management Challenges: Survey of Practitioners in a Large Global IT Company Monika Gupta ∗ , Ashish Sureka ∗ , Srinivas Padmanabhuni † , Allahbaksh Mohammedali Asadullah † ∗ Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India {monikag, ashish}@iiitd.ac.in † Infosys Ltd., Bengaluru, India {srinivas p, allahbaksh asadullah}@infosys.com Abstract—Process mining consists of mining event logs gener- ated from business process execution supported by Information Systems (IS). Process mining of software repositories has diverse applications because vast data is generated during Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and archived in IS such as Version Control System (VCS), Peer Code Review (PCR) System, Issue Tracking System (ITS), and mail archives. There is need to explore its applications on different repositories to aid managers in process management. We conduct two phase surveys and interviews with managers in a large, global, IT company. The first survey and in-person interviews identify the process challenges encountered by them that can be addressed by novel applications of process mining. We filter, group and abstract responses for- mulating 30 generic problem statements. On the basis of process mining type, we classify identified problems to eight categories such as control analysis, organizational analysis, conformance analysis, and preventive analysis. The second survey asks distinct participants the importance of solving identified problems. We calculate proposed Net Importance Metric (NIM) using 1262 ratings from 43 participants. Combined analysis of NIM and first survey responses reveals that the problems mentioned by few practitioners in first survey are considered important by majority in the second survey. We elaborate on possible solutions and challenges for most frequent and important problems. We believe solving these validated problems will help managers in improving project quality and productivity. Index Terms—Process Mining, Qualitative Study, Software Development Life Cycle, Software Repositories I. I NTRODUCTION Mining software repositories is one of the fastest grow- ing field aimed at solving real problems encountered by practitioners and bringing value to industry. It describes a broad class of investigations into the software repositories to uncover interesting and actionable information [1] [2]. Process mining (intersection of Business Process Management and Data Mining) consists of mining event logs generated from business process execution supported by IS [3]. It bridges the gap between traditional model-based process analysis and data-centric analysis techniques. Many process mining framework and tools such as ProM 1 (open source) and Disco 2 (commercial) are used to derive process model and process 1 http://www.processmining.org/prom/start 2 http://www.fluxicon.com/ mine data from different perspectives. Process mining includes process discovery, process performance analysis, conformance verification, case prediction, history based recommendations and organizational analysis [4]. It has already been applied to analyze business processes from multiple domains [5]. Process mining of software repositories has diverse ap- plications and is an area that has recently attracted several researchers’ attention due to availability of vast data generated and archived in multiple IS such as SCM, ITS, VCS, and mail archives during software development. It can provide Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) assessors with relevant information and can support existing software process assessment and improvement approaches [6]. Some of the business applications of process mining software repositories are: uncovering runtime process model [7] [8], discovering process inefficiencies and inconsistencies [7] [9], observing project key indicators and computing correlation between product and process metrics [10], extracting general visual process patterns for effort estimation and analyzing problem resolution activities [11]. Managers work in a fast-changing, hyper competitive, in- terconnected global market place. They can no longer rely on intuition, use of analytics is necessary to improve the quality of decision making. The research objective of the work presented in this paper is to identify the process challenges that community in practice would such as to be addressed by novel applications of process mining. To achieve this, we conduct survey and interviews with managers in a large, global, soft- ware company. We adopt the methodology consisting of two surveys proposed by Begel et al. [12]. 1) We identify the challenges encountered by managers while managing software projects that can be addressed by novel applications of process mining, by conducting first survey and an interview study with purposively sam- pled target population of 300 practitioners. We receive 130 response items from 46 participants that are filtered and grouped into 30 unique problems. 2) We classify identified problems to eight process mining types based on the technique to be used for addressing