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PAID: Prioritizing app issues for developers by tracking user reviews over versions

  • Cuiyun Gao
  • , Baoxiang Wang
  • , Pinjia He
  • , Jieming Zhu
  • , Yangfan Zhou*
  • , Michael R. Lyu
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Fudan University

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

Abstract

User review analysis is critical to the bug-fixing and version-modification process for app developers. Many research efforts have been put to user review mining in discovering app issues, including laggy user interface, high memory overhead, privacy leakage, etc. Existing exploration of app reviews generally depends on static collections. As a result, they largely ignore the fact that user reviews are tightly related to app versions. Furthermore, the previous approaches require a developer to spend much time on filtering out trivial comments and digesting the informative textual data. This would be labor-intensive especially to popular apps with tremendous reviews. In the paper, we target at designing a framework in Prioritizing App Issues for Developers (PAID) with minimal manual power and good accuracy. The PAID design is based on the fact that the issues presented in the level of phrase, i.e., a couple of consecutive words, can be more easily understood by developers than in long sentences. Hence, we aim at recommending phrase-level issues of an app to its developers by tracking reviews over the release versions of the app. To assist developers in better comprehending the app issues, PAID employs ThemeRiver to visualize the analytical results to developers. Finally, PAID also allows the developers to check the most related reviews, when they want to obtain a deep insight of a certain issue. In contrast to the traditional evaluation methods such as manual labeling or examining the discussion forum, our experimental study exploits the first-hand information from developers, i.e., app changelogs, to measure the performance of PAID. We analyze millions of user reviews from 18 apps with 117 app versions and the results show that the prioritized issues generated by PAID match the official changelogs with high precision.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages35-45
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781509004065
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 Jan 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015 - Gaithersbury, United States
Duration: 2 Nov 20155 Nov 2015

Publication series

Name2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015

Conference

Conference26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityGaithersbury
Period2/11/155/11/15

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