Process mining in software systems: Discovering real-life business transactions and process models from distributed systems

This paper presents a novel reverse engineering technique for obtaining real-life event logs from distributed systems. This allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions, and use process mining techniques to obtain precise and formal models. Hence, the work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. We present a formal definition, implementation and an instrumentation strategy based the joinpoint-pointcut model. Two case studies are used to evaluate our approach. These concrete examples demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of our approach.