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Emerging App Issue Identification from User Feedback: Experience on WeChat

  • Cuiyun Gao
  • , Wujie Zheng*
  • , Yuetang Deng
  • , David Lo
  • , Jichuan Zeng
  • , Michael R. Lyu
  • , Irwin King
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Tencent
  • Singapore Management University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

It is vital for popular mobile apps with large numbers of users to release updates with rich features while keeping stable user experience. Timely and accurately locating emerging app issues can greatly help developers to maintain and update apps. User feedback (i.e., user reviews) is a crucial channel between app developers and users, delivering a stream of information about bugs and features that concern users. Methods to identify emerging issues based on user feedback have been proposed in the literature, however, their applicability in industry has not been explored. We apply the recent method IDEA to WeChat, a popular messenger app with over 1 billion monthly active users, and find that the emerging issues detected by IDEA are not stable (i.e., due to its inherent randomness, its results change when run multiple times even for the same inputs), and there are other problems such as long running time. To address these limitations, we design a novel tool, named DIVER. Different from IDEA, DIVER is more efficient (it can report real-Time alerts in seconds), generates reliable results, and most importantly, achieves higher accuracy in our practice. After its deployment on WeChat, DIVER successfully detected 18 emerging issues of WeChat's Android and iOS apps in one month. Additionally, DIVER significantly outperforms IDEA by 29.4% in precision and 32.5% in recall.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering
Subtitle of host publicationSoftware Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages279-288
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728117607
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 25 May 201931 May 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2019

Conference

Conference41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period25/05/1931/05/19

Keywords

  • Mobile apps
  • anomaly
  • app reviews
  • emerging issue detection

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