Abstract
Norms are general expectations of behavior in societies. Huge amount of computer-mediated interaction data available in the social media domain provides an opportunity to extract and study communication norms, both to understand their prevalence and to make informed decisions about adopting them. While interactions in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been widely studied, only recently researchers have started examining app reviews provided by users and the responses provided by developers in the domain of app development. In this vein, a lot of attention has been devoted to study the nature of user reviews, however, little is known about developer responses to such reviews. Additionally, no other prior work has scrutinized the nature of communication norms in this domain. Towards addressing these gaps, this work pursues three objectives using a dataset comprising user reviews and developer responses from Google’s top-20 apps used to track running with a total of 24,407 reviews and 2,668 responses. First, based on prior literature in computer-mediated interactions, the study identifies 12 norms in responses provided by developers in three categories (obligation norms, prohibition norms and domain-specific response norms). Second, it scrutinizes the awareness and adoption of these norms. Third, based on the results obtained, this study identifies the need for creating a response recommendation system that generates responses to user reviews either automatically, or with some help from the developers. The proposed response recommendation system is a normative system that will generate responses that abide by the norms identified in this work, and will also monitor potential norm violations (if the responses were to be modified by the developers). Development of such a system forms the focus of future work.
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Notes
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- 2.
Examples of prohibitions of canned responses are listed in the guidelines for reviews by Amazon and TripAdvisor (refer to: https://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/official-comment-guidelines and http://www.reviewtrackers.com/ultimate-guide-responding-tripadvisor-reviews/).
- 3.
We acknowledge that a developer may have followed a norm in question without consciously being aware of a norm. For example, a developer using salutation may have been exposed to that norm in a different domain (e.g. writing emails). However, in this work, we do not distinguish between the two situations. fo are multiple developers of an app, not all of them may be aware of the norm. This work assumes that if one of the developers is aware of the norm, there is norm awareness among the developers of an app. These aspects can be scrutinized further in a future work, for example by interviewing app developers.
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A prototypical implementation of the system and the user evaluation are described in a subsequent work [35].
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Savarimuthu, B.T.R., Licorish, S.A., Devananda, M., Greenheld, G., Dignum, V., Dignum, F. (2021). Developers’ Responses to App Review Feedback – A Study of Communication Norms in App Development. In: Aler Tubella, A., Cranefield, S., Frantz, C., Meneguzzi, F., Vasconcelos, W. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XIII. COIN COINE 2017 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12298. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72376-7_4
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