LegacyPro: A DNA-inspired method for identifying process legacies in software development organizations

Journal article, 2020

Changing a software development process is a tricky task—the bigger the change, the trickier it gets. Large companies have the inertia of processes, the change of process takes time, happens over multiple releases and at different pace in different parts of the organization. Unfortunately, there are no effective tools available that help us determine if an organization has really adopted a proclaimed process change, as well as to what extent it is making progress towards this desired state. This paper presents a novel and unique method for determining the factual adoption of new processes in software R&D organizations. We use a DNA-inspired analysis (motifs) to categorize parts and find similarities between projects using defect-inflow profiles. We applied the method to analyze projects from a large infrastructure provider and from open source and show quantification of the evolution of processes.