TIJD
11:45-12:30

TITEL
(Re-)discovering the history of your embedded software

SPREKER
Alexander Serebrenik, UD, TUE

ABSTRACT
Modern embedded software development commonly makes use of various configuration management systems, issue tracking systems, automated quality control and testing systems. Using these systems is considered as good development practice and helps enterprises to ensure traceability and quality. All the systems are usually based on repositories that grow over time by storing both the current snapshot and the history of the software under development and accompanying artifacts.
Analysis of the data in the repositories can give valuable insights into the development process of legacy systems. For example, it can answer the following questions: is the project development documentation kept up-to-date with the implementation? How fast are the bugs resolved and the feature requests implemented? Which (groups of) developers are responsible for the introduction of bugs or overtly complex code and the code that does not meet company-specific and/or industry guidelines and standards such as, e.g., Misra? When and where have particular standard violations been introduced and (how) are they related to later discovered bugs? If there is no relation, is it worth narrowing the scope of routine quality checks to actually important ones? What is the share of software artifacts covered by tests and how does this share change in time (e.g., from version to version) and project space (from subsystem to subsystem or one developer group to another)?
In this presentation we advocate the application of process mining to software repositories, a novel approach to repository analysis, which helps address the above questions. The approach builds on a successful process mining approach designed for business process analysis, and goes beyond these limitations allowing the application to multiple heterogeneous repositories typical for the embedded (legacy) software domain. Process mining of software repositories is a two-phased approach. First of all, information is extracted from various data sources such as the repositories mentioned above, mail archives, news groups, twitter messages or issue reports, and combined in one log file. This step is carried out by a tool called Frasr. Next, the log file is fed to a process mining tool, called Prom, which is capable of performing a broad variety of mining, analysis and visualization tasks.
Process mining of software repositories provides a solid basis for prediction-based analysis. While the preceding questions aimed at providing insights in the way software and related documents have evolved so far, prediction-based analysis focusses on providing insights in the way software and related documents can or will evolve in the future. It thereby helps slow down the erosion of software systems.
Process mining of software repositories is a novel promising approach that allows developers, designers and managers to rapidly gain insights in the way the development process is progressing, obstacles it is facing and challenges it has to address. We expect, hence, that incorporating process mining of software repositories in the mainstream software development will both contribute to further improvement of quality and dependability of embedded systems and address or prevent legacy.

BIO
In 1999 Alexander Serebrenik obtained his master’s degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. In July 2003 he defended his PhD thesis entitled ‘Termination analysis of logic programs’ at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he worked at the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence group until December that year. He then became a postdoc researcher in the Sémantique, Preuve et Interprétation Abstraite (Semantics, Proof and Abstract Interpretation) group lead by Radhia Cousot at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. From July 2004 to July 2008 he was an assistant professor at Laquso. Since August 1, 2008, he is a member of the Software Engineering & Technology group at Eindhoven University of Technology.