Automating the Release Planning of Mobile Apps by Including App-Reviews

Abstract

Stakeholders constantly think of the best and sustainable approach in delivering new releases to their customers. Large software companies like Google and Facebook invest huge money in their release planning process. That is because release planning impacts the end-user. One goal in software engineering is to make most or all stakeholders happy. However, start-ups, open-source projects and other small software organizations focused mainly on mobile app development may not have enough resources to invest in their mobile release management; as a result, it is important to plan the releases of mobile apps. The development team makes decisions like who is the release intended for, what functionalities or features should the release have, when should the release happen and how much quality should the release have. In order not to lose customers to competitors, teams must make these decisions carefully. Therefore, it is our strong conviction that with user app-reviews from mobile app stores (e.g., Play Store and App Store), we can automate and optimize the release planning of mobile apps. In this paper, we introduce an approach that automatically plans and optimizes mobile releases for software development teams by combining app-review and issue tracker information.