Process mining can be applied to software too!

Modern information systems produce tremendous amounts of event data. The area of process mining deals with extracting knowledge from this data. Real-life processes can be effectively discovered, analyzed and optimized with the help of mature process mining techniques. There is a variety of process mining case studies and experience reports from such business areas as healthcare, public, transportation and education. Although nowadays, these techniques are mostly used for discovering business processes. The goal of this industrial paper is to show that process mining can be applied to software too. Here we present and analyze our experiences on applying process mining in different productive software systems used in the touristic domain. Process models and user interface workflows underlie the functional specifications of the systems we experiment with. When the systems are utilized, user interaction is recorded in event logs. After applying process mining methods to these logs, process and user interface flow models are automatically derived. These resulting models provide insight regarding the real usage of the software, motivate the changes in the functional specifications, enable usability improvements and software redesign. Thus, with the help of our examples we demonstrate that process mining facilitates new forms of software analysis. The user interaction with almost every software system can be mined in order to improve the software and to monitor and measure its real usage.