Is Your Upgrade Worth It? Process Mining Can Tell

Software vendors typically release updates and upgrades of their software once or twice a year. Users are then faced with the question of whether the upgrade is worth the price and the trouble. The software industry doesn´t provide much evidence that it´s worthwhile to upgrade to new releases. The authors propose the use of process mining to prove that upgrading to the next release provides quantifiable benefits to the end user. Process mining capitalizes on the fact that event logs capture information about processes. These events can be used to make processes visible and show the benefits of using a software product´s next release. Three groups benefits from this process: end users, software suppliers, and researchers. The authors applied process mining to a medical software product and captured empirical data from 1,400 cases. The data shows that the new version was 11 percent more efficient than the old release.