Replication Package for: "Analyzing Reviews and Code of Mobile Apps for better Release Planning."

The mobile applications industry experiences an unprecedented high growth, developers working in this context face a fierce competition in acquiring and retaining users. They have to quickly implement new features and fix bugs, or risks losing their users to the competition. To achieve this goal they must closely monitor and analyze the user feedback they receive in form of reviews. However, successful apps can receive up to several thousands of reviews per day, manually analysing each of them is a time consuming task. To help developers deal with the large amount of available data, we manually analyzed the text of 1566 user reviews and extracted a high and low level taxonomy containing mobile specific categories (e.g. performance, resources, battery, memory, etc.) highly relevant for developers during the planning of maintenance and evolution activities. Then we built the User Request Referencer (URR) prototype, using Machine Learning and Information Retrieval techniques, to automatically classify reviews according to our taxonomy and recommend for a particular review what are the source code artifacts that need to be modified to handle the issue described in the user review. We evaluated our approach through an empirical study involving the reviews and code of 39 mobile applications. Our results show a high precision and recall of URR in organising reviews according to the defined taxonomy. Furthermore, we discovered during the evaluation that using information about the specific structure of mobile software projects (e.g. how to find source code implementing the UI) improves the source code localization results.

This repository provides the replication package with (i) material and working data sets of our study, (ii) complete results of the SURVEY; and (iii) rawdata for replication purposes and to support future studies. A detailed description of the contents is included in README.txt.