Toward obtaining event logs from legacy code

Abstract

Information systems are ageing over time and become legacy information systems which often embed business knowledge that is not present in any other artifact. This embedded knowledge must be preserved to align the modernized versions of the legacy systems with the current business processes of an organization. Process mining is a powerful tool to discover and preserve business knowledge. Most process mining techniques and tools use event logs, registered during execution of process-aware information systems, as the key source of knowledge. Unfortunately, the majority of traditional information systems is not process-aware and does not have any built-in logging mechanisms. Thus, this paper defines the main challenges to be addressed as well as a preliminary solution to obtain event logs from traditional systems. The solution consists of a technique that statically analyzes the source code and modifies it in a non-invasive way. Finally, the modified source code enables the event log registration at runtime based on dynamic source code analysis. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.