Examining User-Developer Feedback Loops in the iOS App Store

Application Stores, such as the iTunes App Store, give developers access to their users’ complaints and requests in the form of app reviews. However, little is known about how developers are responding to app reviews. Without such knowledge developers, users, App Stores, and researchers could build upon wrong foundations. To address this knowledge gap, in this study we focus on feedback loops, which occur when developers address a user concern. To conduct this study we use both supervised and unsupervised methods to automatically analyze a corpus of 1752 different apps from the iTunes App Store consisting of 30,875 release notes and 806,209 app reviews. We found that 18.7% of the apps in our corpus contain instances of feedback loops. In these feedback loops we observed interesting behaviors. For example, (i) feedback loops with feature requests and login issues were twice as likely as general bugs to be fixed by developers, (ii) users who reviewed with an even tone were most likely to have their concerns addressed, and (iii) the star rating of the app reviews did not influence the developers likelihood of completing a feedback loop

A Bibliometric Analysis of the HICSS Software Technology Track

The HICSS Software Technology track has a long tradition and many papers have been published as part of its history. Its impact in terms of citations, paper contributions, author share and community impact does not yet seem to have been investigated, though. In particular, software technology has evolved, and as it stands, it is of primary importance for mobile computing, the Internet-of-Things and Cyber-physical Systems. Hence, the development of these topics and the related impact of this track are of particular interest. In this paper, we present a bibliographic analysis as a first step towards such an investigation. We found that the history of the track is indeed noteworthy. Our results include finding a few extremely much cited papers, some curious tendencies, and a generally favourable outlook for HICSS. We found that indeed many papers in the history of this HICSS track addressed mobile technology and are highly cited. Together with providing insight into track, paper and author impact, we also raise questions worth of further investigation to understand the role of the HICSS Software Technology track and its impact on the academic field and society