RoseMatcher: Identifying the impact of user reviews on app updates

• DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107261
• Publication Date: 2023-05-19T15:42:13Z
• Authors: Tianyang Liu; Chong Wang; Kun Huang; Peng Liang; Beiqi Zhang; Maya Daneva; Marten van Sinderen
• Keywords: Software Engineering (cs.SE); FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Software Engineering; Natural language processing; Release notes; 2023 OA procedure; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; User reviews; App store

Accepted by Information and Software Technology 2023<br/>$\textbf{Context}$: The release planning of mobile apps has become an area of active research, with most studies centering on app analysis through release notes in the Apple App Store and tracking user reviews via issue trackers. However, the correlation between these release notes and user reviews in App Store remains understudied. $\textbf{Objective}$: In this paper, we introduce $\textit{RoseMatcher}$, a novel automatic approach to match relevant user reviews with app release notes and identify matched pairs with high confidence. $\textbf{Methods}$: We collected 944 release notes and 1,046,862 user reviews from 5 mobile apps in the Apple App Store as research data to evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of $\textit{RoseMatcher}$, and conducted deep content analysis on matched pairs. $\textbf{Results}$: Our evaluation shows that $\textit{RoseMatcher}$ can reach a hit ratio of 0.718 for identifying relevant matched pairs, and with the manual labeling and content analysis of 984 relevant pairs, we identify 8 roles that user reviews play in app updates according to the relationship between release notes and user reviews in the relevant matched pairs. $\textbf{Conclusions}$: Our findings indicate that both app development teams and users pay close attention to release notes and user reviews, with release notes typically addressing feature requests, bug reports, and complaints, and user reviews offering positive, negative, and constructive feedback. Overall, the study highlights the importance of the communication between app development teams and users in the release planning of mobile apps, with relevant reviews tending to be posed within a short period before and after the release of release notes, with the average time interval between the post time of release notes and user reviews being approximately one year.<br/>