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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 eectively 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. However, process mining can be applied to software too. In the area of software design and development, process models and user interface workflows underlie the functional specication of almost every substantial software system. When the system is utilized, user interaction with the system can be recorded in event logs. After applying process mining methods to logs, we can derive process and user interface flow models. These models provide insights regarding the real usage of the software and can enable usability improvements and software redesign. In this industrial paper we present several process mining examples of dierent productive software systems used in the touristic domain. With the help of these examples we demonstrate that process mining enables 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.
Article No. 57