Investigating mobile applications' requirements evolution through sentiment analysis of users' reviews

The mobile applications industry is booming and growing rapidly. Mobile software companies and applications' stores are in a continuous need for developing new applications that meet and satisfy the users' requirements. Users' reviews posted in mobile applications' stores after installing the applications by the users can give useful information for developers; they contain good, bad, or recommended features. So the analysis of these reviews is important for the requirements engineering processes in the mobile applications industry. The use of users' feedback in finding software requirements is new in this research field. This paper is a review one, focuses on mobile applications users' reviews sentiment analysis (SA) in order to extract user requirements for building new applications or enhancing existing ones; i.e. requirements evolution. Users' reviews usually contain not only applications' features, but also users' feelings or “sentiments” about these features. We conducted an investigation of approaches used in the literature, during the period from 2009 to 2015 to answer three main research questions. Results show the significance of using SA for analyzing users' reviews and reports automated methods and tools for analyzing the reviews to features and their corresponding sentiments.