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Causal impact analysis for app releases in google play

Martin, W; Sarro, F; Harman, M; (2016) Causal impact analysis for app releases in google play. In: FSE 2016 Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering. (pp. pp. 435-446). ACM: New York, NY, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Causal impact analysis for app releases in google play
Event: 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
ISBN-13: 9781450342186
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/2950290.2950320
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1145/2950290.2950320
Language: English
Additional information: © ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published inFSE 2016 Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering Pages 435-446, https://doi.org/10.1145/2950290.2950320
Keywords: App Store Mining and Analysis, Causal Impact
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1532218
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