Estimating the Degree of User Contribution in App from User Feedback and Developers Update Logs

Apps have become an inseparable part of people’s daily lives. However, in the extremely fierce market competition, apps lacking recognition among users are susceptible to elimination. Therefore, developers must quickly and accurately capture, understand, and adopt the general user requirements to effectively strategize and promote their apps’ organized and healthy evolution. In this study, we refer to the proportion of general user requirements adopted by developers during app evolution as the degree of user contribution, assisting app developers or software engineering researchers in measuring or gaining insight into the evolution of their apps. In this paper, we propose a quantitative analysis approach based on temporal association perception. The main idea is to consider valid user reviews as user requirements and app update logs as developer responses. We then mine and analyze the pairwise and temporal relationships that exist between the two through textual computation, thus quantifying the user contribution from them. To train and evaluate the approach proposed in this paper, and get the proportion of user requirements adopted by developers in the actual development process, we collect 2,489 app update logs and 4,237,031 user reviews of 5 apps from Apple App Store and also conduct a questionnaire survey with app developers in mainland China. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, and the quantified user contributions for the 5 apps in this study ranged from 16.6% to 43.2%. Moreover, according to feedback from developers, the degree of user contribution quantified in this paper is consistent with the developer’s development experience at an aggregate level. The approach proposed in this paper, and the empirical research conducted, provide a new perspective for app developers and software engineering researchers to assess the evolution of apps.