Analysing app reviews for software engineering: a systematic literature review

Abstract

App reviews found in app stores can provide critically valuable information to help software engineers understand user requirements and to design, debug, and evolve software products. Over the last ten years, a vast amount of research has been produced to study what useful information might be found in app reviews, and how to mine and organise such information as efficiently as possible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of this research, covering 182 papers published between 2012 and 2020. This survey classifies app review analysis not only in terms of mined information and applied data mining techniques but also, and most importantly, in terms of supported software engineering activities. The survey also reports on the quality and results of empirical evaluation of existing techniques and identifies important avenues for further research. This survey can be of interest to researchers and commercial organisations developing app review analysis techniques and to software engineers considering to use app review analysis.

How do requirements evolve during elicitation? An empirical study combining interviews and app store analysis

“…Furthermore, our work is also the first one in which traditional interview-based elicitation and app store-inspired elicitation are combined, showing how these provide complementary contributions to the final content of the requirements document. Finally, our work is also the first one that provides quantitative evidence of how much app store mining can be useful for RE, thus addressing part of the limitations observed by Dabrowski et al [25] concerning the limited evidence of practical utility of this practice.…”

“…This study contributes to theory in RE, as it empirically shows that: 1) in interview-based elicitation, requirements are not elicited but co-created by stakeholders and analysts; 2) interviews and app store analysis play complementary roles in requirements definition; 3) app store analysis provides a relevant contribution in practice. This last point addresses the limited evidence about the practical utility of app store analysis observed by the survey of Dabrowski et al [25].…”

“…While previous work focused on supporting this activity with automated recommendation tools (see, e.g., [6][7][8]), this is the first work that quantitatively shows how much is the additional contribution to documented requirements given by browsing similar products. Furthermore, the recent survey by Dabrowski et al [25] has observed that limited evidence is available to show that mining the app store is actually useful for software engineering. Our work provides this missing evidence, also showing how much this can be useful.…”

“…Despite the vast literature, however, it is unclear what is the actual contribution of the different elicitation activities to the final content of the requirements document. Furthermore, the recent survey by Dabrowski et al [25], highlighted that-except for the study by Al-Subaihin et al [9]-there is limited evidence of the practical utility of app store analysis for RE and software engineering activities.…”

Listening to Users' Voice: Automatic Summarization of Helpful App Reviews

“…User feedback plays an essential role in serving as a major channel between developers and users, reflecting new feature requirements, enhancements in the user interface, and reporting serious app bugs [48]. For many years, researchers from academia and industry have explored mining app reviews for assisting different stages of app development and maintenance, such as prioritizing app reviews [1]- [3], [21], [49], predicting app feature liked/disliked by users [7], [8], classifying app reviews [4]- [6], and identifying emerging app issues [9], [10].…”