Listening to the Crowd for the Release Planning of Mobile Apps

Abstract

The market for mobile apps is getting bigger and bigger, and it is expected to be worth over 100 Billion dollars in 2020. To have a chance to succeed in such a competitive environment, developers need to build and maintain high-quality apps, continuously astonishing their users with the coolest new features. Mobile app marketplaces allow users to release reviews. Despite reviews are aimed at recommending apps among users, they also contain precious information for developers, reporting bugs and suggesting new features. To exploit such a source of information, developers are supposed to manually read user reviews, something not doable when hundreds of them are collected per day. To help developers dealing with such a task, we developed CLAP ( C rowd L istener for rele A se P lanning), a web application able to (i) categorize user reviews based on the information they carry out, (ii) cluster together related reviews, and (iii) prioritize the clusters of reviews to be implemented when planning the subsequent app release. We evaluated all the steps behind CLAP , showing its high accuracy in categorizing and clustering reviews and the meaningfulness of the recommended prioritizations. Also, given the availability of CLAP as a working tool, we assessed its applicability in industrial environments.