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 FSE 2016), 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.

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 elicitation from app markets (e.g., description/user reviews)
  • Mining and classifying app market reviews
  • Feedback mechanisms
  • Cross platform app development (e.g., native vs javascript vs html5)
  • App localization
  • Challenges faced by developers in small teams
  • App deployment and release
  • User experience in apps
  • Legal and privacy issues
  • App store policy compliance
  • Monetizing apps
  • Recommending APIs
  • App evolution and maintenance
  • Release management of app in the stores
  • Resource utilization
  • Power management
  • Best practices for app development

Submission

We invite authors to submit any of the two 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)

Workshop papers must follow the FSE 2016 Format and Submission Guidelines.

Please submit your papers here here.

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

Dates

  • Submission Deadline: July 1July 8, 2016
  • Notifications: Aug 15, 2016
  • Camera Ready Deadline: September 15, 2016

Program

  • 09:00 AM - 10.30 AM Data, Metrics and Tools
    • Konstantin Kuznetsov, Vitalii Avdiienko, Alessandra Gorla and Andreas Zeller. Checking App User Interfaces Against App Descriptions
    • Daniel Krutz, Nuthan Munaiah, Andrew Meneely and Samuel Malachowsky. Examining the Relationship between Security Metrics and User Ratings of Mobile Apps: A Case Study
    • Faiz Ali Shah, Yevhenii Sabanin and Dietmar Pfahl. Feature-based Evaluation of Competing Apps
    • Vitalii Avdiienko, Konstantin Kuznetsov, Paolo Calciati, Juan Carlos Caiza Roman, Alessandra Gorla and Andreas Zeller. CALAPPA: a Toolchain for Mining Android Applications
    • Nuthan Munaiah, Casey Klimkowsky, Shannon Trudeau, Adam Blaine, Samuel Malachowsky, Cesar Perez and Daniel Krutz. Darwin: A Static Analysis Dataset of Malicious and Benign Android Apps
  • 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Tea Break
  • 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Keynote: Ankit Jain, VP Special Projects, Similarweb. Analytics in Context
  • 12:30 PM - 02:00 PM Lunch Break
  • 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
    • Maleknaz Nayebi, Homayoon Farrahi, Ada Lee, Henry Cho and Guenther Ruhe. More Insight from being More Focused - Analysis of Clustered Market Apps
    • Stefano Comino, Fabio M. Manenti and Franco Mariuzzo. Managing app versions
    • Ivan Tactuk Mercado, Nuthan Munaiah and Andrew Meneely. The Impact of Cross-platform Development Approaches for Mobile Applications from the User’s Perspective
    • Mohamed Ali and Ali Mesbah. Mining and Characterizing Hybrid Apps
  • 03:30 PM - 04:00 PM Tea Break
  • 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM Discussion on future challenges and trends
  • 06:00 PM - Possibly head to dinner as a group (Location TBD)

Organization

Organising Committee

  • Meiyappan Nagappan, Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Federica Sarro,University College London
  • Emad Shihab, Concordia University

Program Committee

  • Bram Adams, MCIS, Polytechnique Montréal
  • Gabriele Bavota, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
  • Thorsten Berger, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology
  • Christian Bird, Microsoft Research
  • Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, SnT, University of Luxembourg
  • Alessandra Gorla, IMDEA Software Institute
  • William Halfond, University of Southern California
  • Claudia Iacob, University of Portsmouth
  • Yue Jia, UCL
  • Foutse Khomh, DGIGL, École Polytechnique de Montréal
  • Jacques Klein, University of Luxembourg
  • Soo Ling Lim, University College London
  • Sam Malek, University of California, Irvine
  • Ali Mesbah, University of British Columbia
  • Maleknaz Nayebi, University of Calgary
  • Guenther Ruhe, University of Calgary
  • Mario Vasquez, The College of William and Mary