Towards prioritizing user-related issue reports of mobile applications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-15-2019

Abstract

The competitive market of mobile applications (apps) has driven app developers to pay more attention to addressing the issues of mobile apps. Prior studies have shown that addressing the issues that are reported in user-reviews shares a statistically significant relationship with star-ratings. However, despite the prevalence and importance of user-reviews and issue reports prioritization, no prior research has analyzed the relationship between issue reports prioritization and star-ratings. In this paper, we integrate user-reviews into the process of issue reports prioritization. We propose an approach to map issue reports that are recorded in issue tracking systems to user-reviews. Through an empirical study of 326 open-source Android apps, our approach achieves a precision of 79% in matching user-reviews with issue reports. Moreover, we observe that prioritizing the issue reports that are related to user-reviews shares a significant positive relationship with star-ratings. Furthermore, we use the top apps, in terms of star-ratings, to train a model for prioritizing issue reports. It is a good practice to learn from the top apps as there is no well-established approach for prioritizing issue reports. The results show that mobile apps with a similar prioritization approach to our trained model achieve higher star-ratings.

Identifier

85060816197 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Empirical Software Engineering

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09684-y

e-ISSN

15737616

ISSN

13823256

First Page

1964

Last Page

1996

Issue

4

Volume

24

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