Causal impact analysis for app releases in google play

App developers would like to understand the impact of their own and their competitors' software releases. To address this we introduce Causal Impact Release Analysis for app stores, and our tool, CIRA, that implements this analysis. We mined 38,858 popular Google Play apps, over a period of 12 months. For these apps, we identified 26,339 releases for which there was adequate prior and posterior time series data to facilitate causal impact analysis. We found that 33% of these releases caused a statistically significant change in user ratings. We use our approach to reveal important characteristics that distinguish causal significance in Google Play. To explore the actionability of causal impact analysis, we elicited the opinions of app developers: 56 companies responded, 78% concurred with the causal assessment, of which 33% claimed that their company would consider changing its app release strategy as a result of our findings

Investigating the android apps' success: An empirical study

Measuring the success of software systems was not a trivial task in the past. Nowadays, mobile apps provide a uniform schema, i.e., the average ratings provided by the apps' users to gauge their success. While recent research has focused on examining the relationship between change-and fault-proneness and apps' lack of success, as well as qualitatively analyzing the reasons behind the apps' users dissatisfaction, there is little empirical evidence on the factors related to the success of mobile apps. In this paper, we explore the relationships between the mobile apps' success and a set of metrics that not only characterize the apps themselves but also the quality of the APIs used by the apps, as well as user attributes when they interact with the apps. In particular, we measure API quality in terms of bugs fixed in APIs used by apps and changes that occurred in the API methods. We examine different kinds of changes including changes in the interfaces, implementation, and exception handling. For user-related factors, we leverage the number of app's downloads and installations, and users' reviews. Through an empirical study of 474 free Android apps, we find that factors such as the number of users' reviews provided for an app, app's category and size appear to have an impact on the app's success

Software analytics: Challenges and opportunities

Nowadays, software development projects produce a large number of software artifacts including source code, execution traces, end-user feedback, as well as informal documentation such as developers' discussions, change logs, Stack-Overflow, and code reviews. Such data embeds rich and significant knowledge about software projects, their quality and services, as well as the dynamics of software development. Most often, this data is not organized, stored, and presented in a way that is immediately useful to software developers and project managers to support their decisions. To help developers and managers understand their projects, how they evolve, as well as support them during their decision-making process, software analytics - use of analysis, data, and systematic reasoning for making decisions - has become an emerging field of modern data analysis. While results obtained from analytics-based solutions suggested so far are promising, there are still several challenges associated with the adoption of software analytics into software development processes, as well as the development and integration of analytics tools in practical settings. We therefore propose a tutorial on software analytics. The tutorial will start with an introduction of software analytics. Next, we will discuss the main challenges and opportunities associated with software analytics based on the examples from our own research. These examples will cover a range of topics leveraging software analytics. The topics include mobile apps quality, code review process and its quality, analytics for the software engineering Twitter space, as well as the use of analytics to solve scheduling problems in the cloud

Attitude and awareness of medicinal plants in treatment of kidney lithiasis in Eastern Morocco: a retrospective study

Introduction: Kidney stone is a major public health problem. Over 5% of the population is affected by kidney stones, with causes a lifetime risk of transmitting renal lithiasis of about 8 to 10%. Objective: The goal of our study is the attitude and awareness of lithiasis patients regarding the use of medicinal plants in eastern Morocco. Methods: We carried out a study on lithiasis patients to retrospectively identify medicinal plants used in this disease, using a pre-established questionnaire. The study was carried out from 10 December 2017 to 28 February 2018. Results: Our survey describes several medicinal plants used to treat renal lithiasis in eastern Morocco. Most patients used Herniaria hirsuta L., Zea mays L., Urtica dioica L., and Petroselinum crispum (Mill.) Fuss. This preliminary study showed that the first reason to use medicinal plants in half of lithiasis patients is to calm the pain and expel the stones. The primary source of plant use information is oral tradition. However 67% of lithiasis patients are unaware of the harmful and toxic effects that can appear. Conclusion: Medicinal plants must, like medicines, comply with strict requirements and standard rules of use to which only the specialist in herbal medicine can respond and sensitize people to the dangers of irrational consumption of medicinal plants