Automating Developers' Responses to App Reviews
Georgia Greenheld, Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Sherlock A. Licorish · 2018
App reviews are important as they contain valuable information for improving the quality of such software systems. To this end, most users providing app reviews expect a response; to the extent that prior research has shown that when developers respond to app reviews these responses improve app ratings and users' satisfaction. However, unfortunately, user reviews largely go unanswered for most apps due to the high prevalence of reviews. This challenge may be addressed by creating a system that automatically generates responses having learned from the responses already posted by developers for a given app. These generated responses may then be modified by developers if required. This work presents a system that recommends socially-acceptable responses based on principles adopted from three domains: information retrieval, social norms and userinterface design. We then evaluate the newly developed system against Google Play's de facto review response system, which requires developers to write responses manually. The evaluation of the two systems involved measuring participants' feedback on three aspects – usability, cognitive load and performance. The goal of the evaluation was to investigate whether users prefer the new system over the existing system. Our outcomes show that there were statistically significant differences between the two systems on all three aspects evaluated, with users preferring the newly proposed system over Google Play's response system. In particular, the proposed system has the potential to reduce the overall workload of developers considerably.