Examining the relationship between findbugs warnings and app ratings

Authors: Hammad Khalid Meiyappan Nagappan Ahmed E. Hassan

Venue: IEEESW   IEEE Software, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 34-39, 2015

Year: 2015

Abstract: In the mobile-app ecosystem, user ratings of apps (a measure of user perception) are extremely important because they correlate strongly with downloads and hence revenue. A case study examined the relationship between ratings (and the associated review comments) and static-analysis warnings (collected using FindBugs) for 10,000 free-to-download Android apps. Three warning categories - bad practice, internationalization, and performance - were more frequent in low-rated apps and corresponded to the review comment complaints. Thus, these categories were closely related to the user experience. These results suggest that app developers could use static-analysis tools to identify the bugs behind the issues that users complain about, before releasing an app.

Preprint: PDF

BibTeX:

@article{hammadkhalid2015etrbfwaar,
    author = "Hammad Khalid and Meiyappan Nagappan and Ahmed E. Hassan",
    title = "Examining the relationship between findbugs warnings and app ratings",
    year = "2015",
    pages = "34-39",
    journal = "IEEE Software",
    volume = "33",
    number = "4"
}

Plain Text:

Hammad Khalid, Meiyappan Nagappan, and Ahmed E. Hassan, "Examining the relationship between findbugs warnings and app ratings," IEEE Software, pp. 34-39