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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Investigating the criticality of user‐reported issues through their relations with app rating
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Andrea Di Sorbo
  • Giovanni Grano
  • Corrado Aaron Visaggio
  • Sebastiano Panichella
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Journal of Software: Evolution and Process
Publisher Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 2047-7481
Volume 33
Number 3
Page Range e2316
Date 2021
Abstract Text App quality impacts user experience and satisfaction. As a consequence, both app ratings and user feedback reported in app reviews are directly influenced by the user-perceived app quality. Through an empirical study involving 210,517 reviews related to 317 Android apps, in this paper, we experiment with the combined usage of app rating and user reviews analysis (i) to investigate the most important factors influencing the perceived app quality, (ii) focusing on the topics discussed in user review that most relate with app rating. Besides, we investigate whether specific code quality metrics could be monitored to prevent the rising of negative user feedback (i.e., types of user review comments), connected with low ratings. Our study demonstrates that user comments reporting bugs are negatively correlated with the rating, while reviews reportingfeature requests do not. Interestingly, depending on the app category, we observed that different kinds of issues have rather different relationships with the rating and the user-perceived quality of the app. In particular, we observe that for specific app categories (e.g., communication), some code quality factors have significant relationships with the raising of certain types of feedback, which, in turn, are negatively connected with app ratings.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1002/smr.2316
Other Identification Number merlin-id:20049
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