Finding and Analyzing App Reviews Related to Specific Features: A Research Preview

[Context and motivation] App reviews can be a rich source of information for requirements engineers. Recently, many approaches have been proposed to classify app reviews as bug reports, feature requests, or to elicit requirements. [Question/problem] None of these approaches, however, allow requirements engineers to search for users’ opinions about specific features of interest. Retrieving reviews on specific features would help requirements engineers during requirements elicitation and prioritization activities involving these features. [Principal idea/results] This paper presents a research preview on our tool-supported method for taking requirements engineering decisions about specific features. The tool will allow one to (i) find reviews that talk about a specific feature, (ii) identify bug reports, change requests and users’ sentiment about this feature, and (iii) visualize and compare users’ feedback for different features in an analytic dashboard. [Contributions] Our contribution is threefold: (i) we identify a new problem to address, i.e. searching for users’ opinions on a specific feature, (ii) we provide a research preview on an analytics tool addressing the problem, and finally (iii) we discuss preliminary results on the searching component of the tool.