Biblio

Prior work on mobile app reviews has demonstrated that user reviews contain a wealth of information and are seen as a potential source of requirements. However, most of the studies done in this area mainly focused on mining and analyzing user reviews from the US App Store, leaving reviews of users from other countries unexplored. In this paper, we seek to understand if the perception of the same apps between users from other countries and that from the US differs through analyzing user reviews. We retrieve 300,643 user reviews of the 15 most downloaded iOS apps of 2018, published directly by Apple, from nine English-speaking countries over the course of 5 months. We manually classify 3,358 reviews into several software quality and improvement factors. We leverage a random forest based algorithm to identify factors that can be used to differentiate reviews between the US and other countries. Our preliminary results show that all countries have some factors that are proportionally inconsistent with the US.

Agile methods frequently have difficulties with qualities, often specifying quality requirements as stories, e.g., "As a user, I need a safe and secure system." Such projects will generally schedule some capability releases followed by safety and security releases, only to discover user-developer misunderstandings and unsecurable agile code, leading to project failure. Very large agile projects also have further difficulties with project velocity and scalability. Examples are trying to use daily standup meetings, 2-week sprints, shared tacit knowledge vs. documents, and dealing with user-developer misunderstandings. At USC, our Parallel Agile, Executable Architecture research project shows some success at mid-scale (50 developers). We also examined several large (hundreds of developers) TRW projects that had succeeded with rapid, high-quality development. The paper elaborates on their common Critical Quality Factors: a concurrent 3-team approach, an empowered Keeper of the Project Vision, and a management approach emphasizing qualities.