Software Process Mining

Businesses are starting to realize their greatest competitive advantage lies in their software.

Software is at the heart of almost every major innovation, and yet...

Corporate software development lacks transparency and is unfortunately oftentimes full of inefficiencies. A modern company may have millions of lines of code, meaning it is not humanly possible for any one person to grasp exactly what is going on or what is slowing down software production. Complicating this even more is the communication gap resulting from the lack of IT background of many C-suites. A majority of value creation potential is drained by the lack of means of locating inefficiencies in the processes and managing the situation towards higher excellence.

What is Software Process Mining?

Software Process Mining (SPM) is an analytical approach to software development that aims to discover, monitor, and improve software production processes by extracting the data traces already created by tools and and repositories in your software development organization.

Software Process Mining optimizes business value creation by improving the efficiency, productivity and effectiveness of critical software development processes. SPM seamlessly reconstructs entire processes in real time, across all systems, all development teams, and development tools.

Why is Software Process Mining Needed Today?

Businesses have evolved into the digital age, with almost every aspect involving an IT system. This has led the a ubiquitous dependence on tailor-made software systems with self-written code. As companies continue to evolve over time, the code, which serves as the foundation of both their internal and external processes and as the engine for innovation, grows as well, becoming unmanageable and impossible to maintain oversight. Knowledge monopolies arise. Technical debt explodes. Value creation is hindered.

Software Process Mining tackles the complexity and dynamism of modern corporate software production. Whereas software development can be aptly compared with a the opacity of a blackbox, SPM shines a bright light into individual processes, development teams, and entire sections of code so that problems can be identified before they become critical and so that best practices can be spread throughout your organization. This enables the optimization of software development throughout the organization, so that fewer developer hours are wasted fighting fires, digging through technical debt, or trying to comprehend the code.

An added perk: The Seerene software process mining platform can be implemented in minutes.

How Software Process Mining works.

Software Process Mining (SPM) involves four stages.

Collect Data Traces
Uncover Insights
Improve
Monitor & Steer

Step 1: Raw Data Collection

Throughout software development, data traces are constantly being created, a digital footprint of sorts. The Seerene Platform extracts and aggregates the anonymized meta data from systems, regardless of code language. SPM technology reconstructs your software development as it occurred.

Step 2: Insight Discovery

The Seerene platform leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze this data at scale, rendering your entire software development environment at the most intricate level of detail. This data is then made easily digestible through uniform KPIs and software visualizations, which can then be drilled down to the relevant source code, so that actionable insights can be gained.

The objective is to discover:

Problem Areas: Sections of code high in defects or technical debt (and their root causes)
Business Outcomes: Areas of code requiring a greater investment in developer hours than value created
Best Practices

By building a complete picture of your software production, you can prioritize developer efforts according to their impact on vital KPIs, which are tied to desired business outcomes.

Step 3: Improvement

Improve your software development processes by proactively removing productivity drains, such as:

Defect-riddled code
Time-consuming technical debt
Orphaned code
Code with high risk
Knowledge monopolies

Rather than wasting innumerable hours searching through code for the problems, your developers and IT managers are able to precisely identify and rectify root causes of these software challenges with the Seerene platform, resulting in large gains of efficiency and spared time that can be put to better use–creating new features.

Step 4: Monitor and Steer

Monitor and steer the improvement of your software development processes, identifying new opportunities for improvements as they arise. Because continuous improvement is key to Software Process Mining, executives and managers implement KPIs to measure and monitor performance. Through this, it becomes possible to:

Maintain Accountability: Track teams' progress compared to targets.
Make Adjustments as needed.
Increase Buy-In: Improve engagement from diverse stakeholders.
Convince stakeholders to invest in additional software development initiatives.

The Digital Boardroom from Seerene provides executives and managers with the oversight needed to monitor their software process mining efforts and the foundation to make additional strategic decisions. It keeps the organization focused on more strategic goals that actually drive value creation.