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Recommending and release planning of user-driven functionality deletion for mobile apps

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Abstract

Evolving software with an increasing number of features poses challenges in terms of comprehensibility and usability. Traditional software release planning has pre- dominantly focused on orchestrating the addition of features, contributing to the growing complexity and maintenance demands of larger software systems. In mobile apps, an excess of functionality can significantly impact usability, maintainability, and resource consumption, necessitating a nuanced understanding of the applicability of the law of continuous growth to mobile apps. Previous work showed that the deletion of functionality is common and sometimes driven by user reviews. For most users, the removal of features is associated with negative sentiments, prompts changes in usage patterns, and may even result in user churn. Motivated by these preliminary results, we propose Radiation to input user reviews and recommend if any functionality should be deleted from an app’s User Interface (UI). We evaluate Radiation using historical data and surveying developers’ opinions. From the analysis of 190,062 reviews from 115 randomly selected apps, we show that Radiation can recommend functionality deletion with an average F-Score of 74% and if sufficiently many negative user reviews suggest so. We conducted a survey involving 141 software developers to gain insights into the decision-making process and the level of planning for feature deletions. Our findings indicate that 77.3% of the participants often or always plan for such deletions. This underscores the importance of incorporating feature deletion planning into the overall release decision-making process.

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Data availability

The related artifacts of this paper are available at https://github.com/ maleknaz/Radiation. The data of mobile apps are subjected to Google Play copyright, and hence, we cannot openly provide access to them. Our dataset is hosted on GitHub to ensure maintainability and ease of updates while adhering to the legal terms appli- cable to data hosted on mobile app marketplaces. The data was collected exclusively for this study, with no commercial or proprietary use intended, and has been managed in accordance with the relevant terms and conditions. To request access to the dataset, please contact us directly. Each request will be evaluated individually to ensure full compliance with all legal requirements.

Code availability

We used three primary tools and their associated code in the RADIATION steps S1 to S7 [19, 26, 31], as referenced throughout the paper. We foresee future research investing in the improved performance of these technologies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. EXINES Lab, York University, Toronto, Canada

    Maleknaz Nayebi

  2. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Konstantin Kuznetsov

  3. CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Andreas Zeller

  4. SEDS Lab, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

    Guenther Ruhe

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  1. Maleknaz Nayebi
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  2. Konstantin Kuznetsov
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  3. Andreas Zeller
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  4. Guenther Ruhe
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Correspondence to Maleknaz Nayebi.

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Nayebi, M., Kuznetsov, K., Zeller, A. et al. Recommending and release planning of user-driven functionality deletion for mobile apps. Requirements Eng 29, 459–480 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-024-00430-5

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