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Title The V-algorithm for Discovering Software Process Lines
Authors Fabian Rojas, Jocelyn Simmonds, Cecilia Bastarrica
Publication date September 2016
Abstract A software company can define a software process line
(SPrL) to
deal with projects with different characteristics. This entails defining a
base process and its variation points; the SPrL is then tailored to each
project. This approach avoids the co-evolution problems but is expensive to
set up. In companies that register project events, this information could be
used to discover the SPrL. However, traditional discovery algorithms focus
on extracting a single process, which can be overly complex and would not be
useful for managing future projects. Filtering out less frequent behavior
leads to the discovery of simpler models, but these may not include relevant
behavior. To address these issues, we propose the v-algorithm, which
discovers a SPrL from process logs. Two thresholds split the log into three
clusters based on relation frequency. The first one is used to generate the
base process, the second one is used to identify variable elements, and the
last one is discarded. We used the v-algorithm to discover the SPrL of
Mobius, a small Chilean software company. We also discuss how the values of
the thresholds affect the process discovery quality dimensions, extending
existing metrics to the SPrL case.
Pages 783-799
Volume 28
Journal name Journal of Software: Evolution and Process
Publisher John Wiley & Sons (Hoboken, NJ, USA)
Reference URL View reference page