Opinion mining for app reviews aims to analyze people's comments on app stores to support software engineering activities, particularly software maintenance and evolution. One of the main challenges for software quality maintenance is promptly identifying emerging issues, e.g., bugs. However, due to a large amount of textual data, manually analyzing these comments is challenging, and machine learning-based methods have been used to automate opinion mining. Our objective is to minimize the time between the occurrence of the issue and its correction, providing means for the quick identification of the issue through prioritization levels. This paper introduces the automatic generation of a risk matrix from user reviews to answer the following research question: how do we prioritize and treat reviews in time so that the app is competitive and guarantees the timely maintenance and evolution of the software? We present the MApp-IDEA (Monitoring App for Issue Detection and Prioritization) method to detect issues and classify the reviews in a risk matrix with prioritization levels. We present an approach that (i) automatically collects reviews, (ii) detects issues, (iii) classifies reviews in a risk matrix, and then (iv) models the temporal dynamics of issues and risks through time series to trigger alerts. The results showed that our unsupervised issue detection approach is competitive compared to state-of-the-art supervised methods. We performed an empirical evaluation with 50 mobile applications (apps) and processed approximately 5 million reviews, where we detected 230,000 issues and classified them into priority levels using a risk matrix. We have shown that opinions extracted from user comments provide important information about the app's issues and risks. In evaluation, we found that issues detected early with our approach are associated with later fix releases by developers.
Opinion mining for app reviews aims to analyze people’s comments from app stores to support data-driven requirements engineering activities, such as bug report classification, new feature requests, and usage experience. However, due to a large amount of textual data, manually analyzing these comments is challenging, and machine-learning-based methods have been used to automate opinion mining. Although recent methods have obtained promising results for extracting and categorizing requirements from users’ opinions, the main focus of existing studies is to help software engineers to explore historical user behavior regarding software requirements. Thus, existing models are used to support corrective maintenance from app reviews, while we argue that this valuable user knowledge can be used for preventive software maintenance. This paper introduces the temporal dynamics of requirements analysis to answer the following question: how to predict initial trends on defective requirements from users’ opinions before negatively impacting the overall app’s evaluation? We present the MAPP-Reviews (Monitoring App Reviews) method, which (i) extracts requirements with negative evaluation from app reviews, (ii) generates time series based on the frequency of negative evaluation, and (iii) trains predictive models to identify requirements with higher trends of negative evaluation. The experimental results from approximately 85,000 reviews show that opinions extracted from user reviews provide information about the future behavior of an app requirement, thereby allowing software engineers to anticipate the identification of requirements that may affect the future app’s ratings.
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