Combining goal model with reviews for supporting the evolution of apps

To support the iterative development process of Apps, the goal model is not only established to describe the requirements at the early stage but also used for identifying the updating strategy in every iteration. In this process, reviews from users provide valuable information for developers to analyse the model with users sentiments. In this study, the authors combine the goal model with reviews for supporting the evolution of Apps. First, the authors introduce the reviews into the goal model as a new factor by comparing keywords. Second, the users sentiments in reviews are mined, and two kinds of information are gained by analysing the model to help developers make decisions on which goals to be improved in next version: one kind of information is about users sentiments on the goals to evaluate whether users like them; another kind is the impact of updating one goal to others. To validate the proposed approach, they conducted experiments and a survey based on the Apps in Google Play. The results show that the proposed approach can establish relationships between goals and reviews reasonably and further provide useful information for optimising the evolution strategy of the App.