Mining developers’ workflows from IDE usage

Abstract

An increased understanding of how developers’ approach the development of software and what individual challenges they face, has a substantial potential to better support the process of programming. In this paper, we adapt Rabbit Eclipse, an existing Eclipse plugin, to generate event logs from IDE usage enabling process mining of developers’ workflows. Moreover, we describe the results of an exploratory study in which the event logs of 6 developers using Eclipse together with Rabbit Eclipse were analyzed using process mining. Our results demonstrate the potential of process mining to better understand how developers’ approach a given programming task.