Process Mining from Jira Issues at a Large Company

Maintaining a software system is a continuous and complex process, typically following a workflow defined by the responsible organization. However, in practice, developers often deviate from the defined process due to personal preferences, varying customer requirements, or urgent deadlines. Such deviations may cause problems later on, or they may indicate potential process improvements. To deal with deviations and improve processes, it is first necessary to fully understand the processes actually employed by developers. For this purpose, process-mining techniques have been proposed that primarily build on version-control data. In this paper, we present a complementary process-mining technique that uses Jira issues to recover process activities not visible in version-control data, particularly focusing on developers’ interactions with issues and each other. We conducted a case study with 74 repositories of 24 developer teams from one large international company to understand the technique’s merits. Our technique revealed process differences across teams and depending on the types of Jira issues, providing novel insights for the company that helped to better understand the employed processes.