Temporal dynamics of requirements engineering from mobile app reviews

Opinion mining for app reviews aims to analyze people’s comments from app stores to support data-driven requirements engineering activities, such as bug report classification, new feature requests, and usage experience. However, due to a large amount of textual data, manually analyzing these comments is challenging, and machine-learning-based methods have been used to automate opinion mining. Although recent methods have obtained promising results for extracting and categorizing requirements from users’ opinions, the main focus of existing studies is to help software engineers to explore historical user behavior regarding software requirements. Thus, existing models are used to support corrective maintenance from app reviews, while we argue that this valuable user knowledge can be used for preventive software maintenance. This paper introduces the temporal dynamics of requirements analysis to answer the following question: how to predict initial trends on defective requirements from users’ opinions before negatively impacting the overall app’s evaluation? We present the MAPP-Reviews (Monitoring App Reviews) method, which (i) extracts requirements with negative evaluation from app reviews, (ii) generates time series based on the frequency of negative evaluation, and (iii) trains predictive models to identify requirements with higher trends of negative evaluation. The experimental results from approximately 85,000 reviews show that opinions extracted from user reviews provide information about the future behavior of an app requirement, thereby allowing software engineers to anticipate the identification of requirements that may affect the future app’s ratings.