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David.

In answer to your question Joos, it was probably more of the latter “searching for a better way to discover the legacy system’s process”.

The project(over a year ago now) was my first opportunity to test ProM’s capabilities.

Hi Mark,

The application logged each users’ sessions on the website and the pages they visited as well as the business process that the users were progressing through.

A second log contained every SOAP API call made by the system to external systems, as well as user id and web session id and time-stamp.

These two logs contained sufficient information for what we were required to document, while another log contained ‘milestone’ events within the process such as ‘PAYMENT (complete)’ again tied back to the users web session id.

Although the logs contained every web page post parameter, and every SOAP request/response pair, we were not required to drill down to that level of detail.

Scripts were written to combined the logs into basic MXML files. I then analyzed these in ProM via the “DWS mining plugin”.

One of the reasons for choosing this plugin is its ability to split a large complex process into a number of smaller and simpler special cases.

Once we were happy with the process graphs being produced for one process, I simply ran the scripts to extract each of the remaining business processes to its own MXML.

And showed both the technical writer (Geoff) and the developers how to interpret these and view them via ProM.

This gave them access to a graphical representation of all 16 processes far sooner than otherwise possible.

The effect for myself was that it was little or no more effort to analysis all 16 processes as it was to analysis 1.

While for the technical writer and developers once they understood how to understand the first process diagram, the remaining 15 had very similar layout and shared many of the same steps and they were able to progress through the latter processes at a faster rate, without being dependent on the other.

By removing the technical writer’s dependency on the developers to first having to complete their review of each this allowed him to finish documenting the processes prior to the code reviews being completed.

@Mark: why don’t you believe it? It sounds possible to me!

I don’t know if David Truffet will be reading this but I have a question: did you know of process mining and/or ProM before you started the project or did you encounter it while searching for a better way to discover the legacy system’s process?

Joos