Reconstructing de facto software development methods

Software development is a complex process that requires disciplined engineering approaches. Empirical studies show that companies still don’t document their development practice, or if they do, these are not up-to-date and do not reflect how they really develop software. The main objective of this paper is to propose an approach that can help companies in documenting their real development practice. Comparing to existing approaches that require substantial effort on the side of project members, our approach extracts information on development practice directly from software repositories. Five companies have been studied to identify information that can be retrieved from software repositories. Based on this, an approach to reconstruct development practice has been developed. The approach has been evaluated on a real software repository shared by an additional company. The results confirm that software repository information suffice for the reconstruction of various aspects of development process, i.e. disciplines, activities, roles, and artifacts.