Safwat Hassan

University of Toronto | U of T · Faculty of Information

Upon receiving a new issue report, practitioners start by investigating the defect type, the potential fixing effort needed to resolve the defect and the change impact. Moreover, issue reports contain valuable information, such as, the title, description and severity, and researchers leverage the topics of issue reports as a collective metric portr...

The Continuous Integration (CI) practice allows developers to build software projects automatically and more frequently. However, CI builds may undergo long build durations or frequent build breakages, which we refer to as build performance. Both long durations and frequent breakages of CI builds can impede developers from engaging in other develop...

The rapid growth of the mobile applications development industry raises several new challenges to developers as they need to respond quickly to the users’ needs in a world of continuous changes. Indeed, mobile apps undergo frequent updates to introduce new features, fix reported issues or adapt to new technological or environment changes. Hence, in...

The competing nature of the app market motivates us to shift our focus on apps that provide similar functionalities and directly compete with each other (i.e., peer apps). In this work, we study the ratings and the review text of 100 Android apps across 10 peer app groups. We highlight the importance of performing peer-app analysis by showing that...

Release notes of a new mobile release provide valuable information for app users about the updated functionality of an app. Moreover, app developers can use the release notes to inform users about the resolution of a previously reported issue in user reviews. Prior work shows that release notes are an essential artifact for app developers to announ...

Given the competitive mobile app market, developers must be fully aware of users’ needs, satisfy users’ requirements, combat apps of similar functionalities (i.e., competing apps), and thus stay ahead of the competition. While it is easy to track the overall user ratings of competing apps, such information fails to provide actionable insights for d...

UI (User Interface) is an essential factor influencing users’ perception of an app. However, it is hard for even professional designers to determine if the UI is good or not for end-users. Users’ feedback (e.g., user reviews in the Google Play) provides a way for app owners to understand how the users perceive the UI. In this article, we conduct an...

In-app advertisements have become a major revenue source for app developers in the mobile app ecosystem. Ad libraries play an integral part in this ecosystem as app developers integrate these libraries into their apps to display ads. In this paper, we study ad library integration practices by analyzing 35,459 updates of 1,837 top free-to-download a...

Developer chatrooms (e.g., the Gitter platform) are gaining popularity as a communication channel among developers. In developer chatrooms, a developer ( asker ) posts questions and other developers ( respondents ) respond to the posted questions. The interaction between askers and respondents results in a discussion thread . Recent studies show th...

In-app advertisements have become a major revenue source for app developers in the mobile app ecosystem. Ad libraries play an integral part in this ecosystem as app developers integrate these libraries into their apps to display ads. In this paper, we study ad library integration strategies by analyzing 35,459 updates of 1,837 top free-to-download...

In-app advertisements have become an integral part of the revenue model of mobile apps. To gain ad revenue, app developers integrate ad libraries into their apps. Such libraries are integrated to serve advertisements (ads) to users; developers then gain revenue based on the displayed ads and the users' interactions with such ads. As a result, ad li...

TOSEM

Machine learning is a popular method of learning functions from data to represent and to classify sensor inputs, multimedia, emails, and calendar events. Smartphone applications have been integrating more and more intelligence in the form of machine learning. Machine learning functionality now appears on most smartphones as voice recognition, spell...

Developers always focus on delivering high-quality updates to improve, or maintain the rating of their apps. Prior work has studied user reviews by analyzing all reviews of an app. However, this app-level analysis misses the point that users post reviews to provide their feedback on a certain update. For example, two bad updates of an app with a hi...

The popularity of mobile apps continues to grow over the past few years. Mobile app stores, such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store provide a unique user feedback mechanism to app developers through the possibility of posting app reviews. In the Google Play Store (and soon in the Apple App Store), developers are able to respond to such...

The popularity of mobile apps continues to grow over the past few years. Mobile app stores, such as the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store provide a unique user feedback mechanism to app developers through app reviews. In the Google Play Store (and most recently in the Apple App Store), developers are able to respond to such user feedback. Ove...

The mobile app market continues to grow at a tremendous rate. The market provides a convenient and efficient distribution mechanism for updating apps. App developers continuously leverage such mechanism to update their apps at a rapid pace. The mechanism is ideal for publishing emergency updates (i.e., updates that are published soon after the prev...

The production of well-developed software reduces the cost of the software maintainability. Therefore, many software metrics have been developed to measure the quality of the software design. Measuring class cohesion is considered as one of the most important software quality measurements. Unfortunately, most of approaches that have been proposed o...

The production of well-developed software reduces the cost of the software maintainability. Therefore, many software metrics have been developed to measure the quality of the software design. Measuring class cohesion is considered as one of the most important software quality measurements. Unfortunately, most of approaches that have been proposed o...