Process discovery
Process discovery is the process-mining technique of constructing a process model (typically BPMN or a Petri net) from an event log without prior knowledge of the intended process. Discovery algorithms, Alpha Miner, Heuristic Miner, Inductive Miner, produce the model that best explains the observed event sequences.
The output of process discovery is often surprising: the discovered process diverges from the documented process in ways nobody noticed. Common discoveries: the 'happy path' the documentation describes happens in only 30% of cases; a 'rare exception' handler runs for 25% of cases; loops the team didn't realise existed account for hours of cycle time. The pragmatic use: discover, identify the top 2-3 variants by frequency, ask 'is this what we actually want?', and either change the process or update the documentation. Discovery is the first step; conformance checking, variant analysis, and enhancement follow.