Integrating User Reviews and Issue Reports of Mobile Apps for Change Requests Detection

Abstract

There is abundance of mobile Apps released continuously on the App store, where developers are required to maintain these Apps to attain user satisfaction. Developers should consider all user feedback, as they are important resources for planning of next App’s release. In order to consider user feedback, many platforms host mobile Apps and allow users to submit their opinions, such as: Google Play App store and Github Open-Source Development platform. The automated consolidation of user feedback from such platforms, and transforming it into a list of change requests would result in satisfying users across different platforms, and their analysis helps developer to reduce cost of time and effort to plan for the new release of the mobile App. In this paper, a framework is proposed which integrates user feedback from different sources and analyzes them using a state-of-art user reviews analysis tool to obtain a list of change requests, such list is further examined for similarity to remove duplicates and prioritize the identified change requests. A prototype is designed to implement the proposed framework and applied to AntennaPod. Consequently, the framework experimentation results show that reviews and issue reports can be analyzed almost equally despite the difference of text’s nature.