An Automated Feedback-Based Approach to Support Mobile App Development

Abstract

The acceptance of mobile applications is highly dependent on the realized set of features and on the quality of the application. Information about their acceptance can be gained quickly by collecting and analyzing user feedback such as explicit textual reviews provided by an application's users or implicitly provided usage data. With an approach based on developing a minimal set of functions in order to realize a minimum viable product (MVP), it is possible to put a product on the market within a short amount of time. Currently, the elicitation, analysis, and processing of user feedback is unfocused and takes too much time and effort to mitigate the poor quality of the application. Hence, we outline an approach named Opti4Apps, which is aimed at tailored quality assurance as part of MVP development and enables and expands the benefits of an MVP by providing a semiautomated feedback elicitation, analysis, and processing framework. This is intended to raise the effectiveness and efficiency of early user feedback consideration during further development in order to assure the quality and acceptance of an app as an MVP. We will present the overall structure as well as the process behind the Opti4Apps framework. As proof-ofconcept, we implemented an initial prototype of our idea, focused on textual user feedback.