The Impact of API Change- and Fault-Proneness on the User Ratings of Android Apps

被引：143

作者：

Bavota, Gabriele ^{[1
]}

Linares-Vasquez, Mario ^{[2
]}

Bernal-Cardenas, Carlos Eduardo ^{[2
]}

Di Penta, Massimiliano ^{[3
]}

Oliveto, Rocco ^{[4
]}

Poshyvanyk, Denys ^{[2
]}

机构：

[1] Free Univ Bozen Bolzano, Dept Comp Sci, Bolzano, Italy

[2] Coll William & Mary, Dept Comp Sci, Williamsburg, VA 23185 USA

[3] Univ Sannio, Dept Engn, Benevento, Italy

[4] Univ Molise, Dept Biosci & Terr, Pesche, IS, Italy

来源：

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING | 2015年 / 41卷 / 04期

基金：

美国国家科学基金会;

关键词：

Mining software repositories; empirical studies; android; API changes;

D O I：

10.1109/TSE.2014.2367027

中图分类号：

TP31 [计算机软件];

学科分类号：

081202 ; 0835 ;

摘要：

The mobile apps market is one of the fastest growing areas in the information technology. In digging their market share, developers must pay attention to building robust and reliable apps. In fact, users easily get frustrated by repeated failures, crashes, and other bugs; hence, they abandon some apps in favor of their competition. In this paper we investigate how the fault-and change-proneness of APIs used by Android apps relates to their success estimated as the average rating provided by the users to those apps. First, in a study conducted on 5,848 (free) apps, we analyzed how the ratings that an app had received correlated with the fault-and change-proneness of the APIs such app relied upon. After that, we surveyed 45 professional Android developers to assess (i) to what extent developers experienced problems when using APIs, and (ii) how much they felt these problems could be the cause for unfavorable user ratings. The results of our studies indicate that apps having high user ratings use APIs that are less fault-and change-prone than the APIs used by low rated apps. Also, most of the interviewed Android developers observed, in their development experience, a direct relationship between problems experienced with the adopted APIs and the users' ratings that their apps received.

引用

页码：384 / 407

页数：24

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