Visualizing issue tracking data using a process mining tool to support the agile maturity assessment within the Scaled Agile Framework : A case study

Abstract: Today, agile development is broadly used within both small and large organizations worldwide. Transitioning to agile development in a large organization is a complex task that requires support from everyone in it. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a framework meant to help integrate agile development within all parts of an organization. Regularly conducted assessments of how well an organization has integrated agile development can be a way to make sure the transition is happening as intended. These kinds of assessments are often called agile maturity assessments. SAFe includes such an assessment, but since the assessment is based on thoughts and reflections from members in the organization, doing the assessment can be difficult and may give unreliable results. This study aims to explore one way to support the assessment with objective data by generating visualizations of issue tracking data extracted from Jira and Github. The Inductive visual Miner, a plugin in the process mining software ProM, was used for the visualizations. A case study was conducted at the IT department of the Swedish Tax Agency. A slightly modified version of the methodology called the PM2 methodology was used to conduct the study. The modified methodology included six stages; a planning stage, a data extraction stage, a data processing stage, a mining and analysis stage, an evaluation stage and lastly, an improvement stage where an attempt was made to improve the visualizations based on the analysis and the evaluation. The planning stage was used to gain information about the work processes in the organization and what kind of data that may exist in the chosen data sources. A set of goal questions connected to the agile maturity assessment were generated, which the visualizations were expected to provide answers to. Data from six teams were then used to generate the visualizations. At first, the visualizations were explored and later evaluated in collaboration with the SCRUM-master in each team. The results in this study show that visualizations generated from issue tracking data using the Inductive visual Miner can be used to answer questions about time and order of events that are related to the agile maturity assessment within SAFe. However, additional analysis and reflections are needed to draw conclusions about the agile maturity from the information obtained from the visualizations. A set of requirements for the data used to generate this kind of visualizations is also proposed. The requirements were based on the results from all stages.