2nd International Workshop on
App Market Analytics

Paderborn, Germany
September 05, 2017


News: You can find the program below!

News: We are delighted to announce that Simon Oberthür and Alessandra Gorla will attend WAMA as invited speakers!

Software applications (or apps) are distributed very differently these days than how they were once distributed - through centralized market places (which has changed the way developers interact with users, the way software is released, and consumed). These app markets, which are now standard for mobile apps, are getting popular now for desktop apps, games, and even open source apps. Such markets make it easier for app developers to release their new apps and update their existing apps. It also makes it easier for users to search, compare and download new apps and keep their existing apps up to date. Additionally, the app markets provide useful guidance to developers so that end users have the best quality apps. Finally, the market is public facing and has unique data like user comments, release notes, app popularity, besides just the app itself. Hence, app markets can be mined and the resulting data analyzed by researchers and analytics companies. Therefore, in this workshop (happening in conjunction with ESEC/FSE 2017), we seek to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss research challenges, ideas, initiatives and results that leverages such app market data to answer pertinent software engineering questions using analytical and empirical approaches. Furthermore, we want to incorporate interdisciplinary collaborations regarding economic aspects.

Call for Papers

We will seek original articles on studies that are related to app markets, with the end goal of making concrete recommendations to the app developers, app market developers, or other developers who provide libraries and frameworks for building apps, and end users. We especially encourage articles on:

  • Requirements in app markets (e.g., elicitation from descriptions and user reviews)
  • Feedback & reputation in app markets
    • Mining and classifying app reviews
    • Impact of app reviews
    • Interactions of reviews and pricing
  • App market design
    • App store policy compliance
    • Market mechanisms in app stores
  • App Development
    • Cross platform app development
    • App evolution and maintenance
    • Best practices
  • App project management
    • App deployment and release management
    • Challenges faced by small teams
    • Monetizing apps (e.g., optimal pricing, assessment of costs)
  • Quality of apps
    • User experience
    • Consumer perception
    • Legal and privacy issues
    • Resource utilization & power management
    • App recommendation
  • General software markets
    • Applicability of app market concepts to general software markets

Submission

We invite authors to submit any of the following kinds of workshop papers:

  • Full papers with 7 pages maximum
  • Data/Tool/Position papers with 4 pages maximum
  • Practitioner talk abstracts (500 words) are only open to practitioners and should describe in 500 words or less, a talk on a key aspect or challenge of app market analytics (primarily experience-based)
  • Posters along with a 2 pager

Workshop papers must follow the FSE 2017 Format and Submission Guidelines (but they do not have to be "double blind").

Please submit your papers here here.

All accepted contributions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings and in the ACM Digital Library.

At least one author of each accepted contribution has to register (non-student registration) for the ESEC/FSE workshops by July 8, see http://esec-fse17.uni-paderborn.de/registration.php.

Dates

  • Submission Deadline: May 12 May 19, 2017
  • Submission Deadline for 2 pagers: June 25, 2017
  • Notifications: June 16, 2017
  • Camera Ready Deadline: July 3, 2017

Accepted Papers

  • Yuta Ishii, Takuya Watanabe, Fumihiro Kanei, Yuta Takata, Eitaro Shioji, Mitsuaki Akiyama, Takeshi Yagi, Bo Sun and Tatsuya Mori: Understanding the Security Management of Global Third-Party Android Marketplaces
  • Alireza Sadeghi, Naeem Esfahani and Sam Malek: Mining Mobile App Markets for Prioritization of Security Assessment Effort
  • Giovanni Grano, Andrea Di Sorbo, Francesco Mercaldo, Corrado A. Visaggio, Gerardo Canfora and Sebastiano Panichella: Android Apps and User Feedback: a Dataset for Software Evolution and Quality Improvement
  • Frederik Simon Bäumer, Markus Dollmann and Michaela Geierhos: Studying Software Descriptions in SourceForge and App Stores for a better Understanding of real-life Requirements

Keynotes

  • Simon Oberthür: App stores - Past, present and future development and their role our fast changing world

    App Stores and the Internet changed, how software is delivered and perceived. This talk looks at key features of app market stores and what impact they had and have on software delivery. Modern key features are: continuous delivery, user ratings and comments, equal access for developer and analytic tools. It ends with a peak into the future: Modern infrastructures like cloud computing and the upcoming 5G network are giving a new bases for app stores beside the ‘classical’ app store areas: mobile and desktop.

    About the speaker: Dr. Simon Oberthür is a scientist in the field of computer science for over ten years. His areas of expertise are distributed real-time systems, resource management, DevOps, GreenIT, cloud & mobile. His special interests are the development of methods and processes for a self-determined digital change supported by modern technologies. Currently, Dr. Simon Oberthür is involved in the development of the SICP – Software Innovation Campus Paderborn where he is responsible for the competence centre "Mobile and Cloud Systems".

  • Alessandra Gorla: Mining the Google Play for Anomalies

    In this talk I will present several analysis techniques that we have developed in the last few years in order to identify anomalous Android applications on the Google Play. We can detect anomalies that involve mismatches between the description and the implementation, anomalies in the use of sensitive information, and anomalies in the user interface. I will conclude the talk by also presenting the most recent work on detecting anomalies on how applications evolve across different releases.

    About the speaker: Alessandra Gorla is an Assistant Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute since December 2014. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy, and she completed her Ph.D. in informatics at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland in 2011. In her Ph.D. thesis she defined and developed the notion of Automatic Workarounds, a self-healing technique to recover Web applications from field failures, a work for which she received the Fritz Kutter Award for the best industry related Ph.D. thesis in computer science in Switzerland. Before joining the IMDEA Software Institute, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in the software engineering group at Saarland University in Germany. During her postdoc, she has also been a visiting researcher at Google in Mountain View. Her primary research activities are in the areas of software engineering, with a particular focus on the automation of software testing and analysis activities, and mobile application security.

Program

Tuesday, September 5th (Room: F0.530)

  • 09:00-10:30 1st morning session
    • 9:00-9:15 Opening
    • 9:15-9:30 Elevator Pitches + collect questions that the attendees expect to get answered during the workshop
    • 9:30-10:30 Invited talk by Dr. Simon Oberthür + Questions & Discussion
  • 10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
  • 11:00-12:30 2nd morning session
    • 11:00-11:30 Yuta Ishii, Takuya Watanabe, Fumihiro Kanei, Yuta Takata, Eitaro Shioji, Mitsuaki Akiyama, Takeshi Yagi, Bo Sun and Tatsuya Mori: Understanding the Security Management of Global Third-Party Android Marketplaces
    • 11:30-12:00 Alireza Sadeghi, Naeem Esfahani and Sam Malek: Mining Mobile App Markets for Prioritization of Security Assessment Effort
    • 12:00-12:30 Giovanni Grano, Andrea Di Sorbo, Francesco Mercaldo, Corrado A. Visaggio, Gerardo Canfora and Sebastiano Panichella: Android Apps and User Feedback: a Dataset for Software Evolution and Quality Improvement
  • 12:30-13:30 Lunch
  • 13:30-15:00 1st afternoon session
    • 13:30-14:30 Invited Talk by Dr. Alessandra Gorla + Questions & Discussion
    • 14:30-15:00 Frederik Simon Bäumer, Markus Dollmann and Michaela Geierhos: Studying Software Descriptions in SourceForge and App Stores for a better Understanding of real-life Requirements
  • 15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
  • 15:30-17:00 2nd afternoon session
    • 15:30-16:45: Discussion / Panel on open questions and future challenges
    • 16:45-17:00: Closing Remarks

Organization

Organising Committee

  • Federica Sarro, University College London
  • Emad Shihab, Concordia University
  • Meiyappan Nagappan, University of Waterloo
  • Marie C. Platenius, Paderborn University
  • Daniel Kaimann, Paderborn University

Program Committee

  • Bram Adams, MCIS, Polytechnique Montréal
  • Gabriele Bavota, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
  • Thorsten Berger, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg
  • Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, SnT, University of Luxembourg
  • Claus-Jochen Haake, University of Paderborn
  • Burkhard Hehenkamp, University of Paderborn
  • Claudia Iacob, University of Portsmouth
  • Foutse Khomh, DGIGL, École Polytechnique de Montréal
  • Jacques Klein, University of Luxembourg
  • Soo Ling Lim, University College London
  • Mario Linares-Vásquez, Universidad de los Andes
  • Sam Malek, University of California, Irvine
  • Maleknaz Nayebi, University of Calgary
  • Sven Overhage, University of Bamberg
  • Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research