Mining Reviews in Open Source Code for Developers Trail: A Process Mining Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces Act-Trace, a process mining algorithm that constructs developer activity logs from open source repositories to visualize workflows and understand community behavior.

Contribution

It presents a novel process mining approach tailored for open source code repositories, enabling activity tracing and workflow modeling.

Findings

Successfully constructs process models from open source data

Provides insights into developer activity sequences

Demonstrates effectiveness of Act-Trace algorithm

Abstract

Audit trails are evidential indications of activities performers in any logs. Modern reactive systems such as transaction processing systems, management information systems, decision support systems and even executive management systems log activities of users as they perform their daily tasks for a number of reasons and perhaps one of the most important is security. In order to efficiently monitor and manage privacy and access to information, the trails as captured and recorded in these logs play a pivotal role in this regard. In Open Source realm, however, this is not the case. Although the objective with free software is to allow for access, free distribution and the rights to modify coding, having such audit trails can help to trace and understand how active members of these communities are and the type of activities they perform. In this paper, we propose using process mining to construct logs using as much data as can be found in open source repositories in order to produce a process model, also called a workflow net that graphical depicts the sequential occurrence of developers activities. Our method is exhibited through a simple algorithm called Act-Trace.