Mining Cross-Domain Apps for Software Evolution: A Feature-based Approach

The skyrocketing growth of mobile apps and mobile devices has significantly fueled the competition among app developers. They have leveraged the app store capabilities to analyse app data and identify app improvement opportunities. Existing research has shown that app developers mostly rely on in-domain (i.e., same domain or same app) data to improve their apps. However, relying on in-domain data results in low diversity and lacks novelty in recommended features. In this work, we present an approach that automatically identifies, classifies and ranks relevant popular features from cross-domain apps for recommendation to any given target app. It includes the following three steps: 1) identify cross-domain apps that are relevant to the target app in terms of their features; 2) filter and group semantically the features of the relevant cross-domain apps that are complementary to the target app; 3) rank and prioritize the complementary cross-domain features (in terms of their domain, app, feature and popularity characteristics) for adoption by the target app’s developers. We have run extensive experiments on 100 target apps from 10 categories over 15,200 cross-domain apps from 31 categories. The experimental results have shown that our approach to identifying, grouping and ranking complementary cross-domain features for recommendation has achieved an accuracy level of over 89%. Our semantic feature grouping technique has also significantly outperformed two existing baseline techniques. The empirical evaluation validates the efficacy of our approach in providing personalised feature recommendation and enhancing app’s user serendipity.