Ruhe, GuentherNayebi, Maleknaz2018-01-312018-01-312018-01-15Nayebi, M. (2018), Analytical Release Management for Mobile Apps (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/5456http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106375Developing software products and maintaining software versions for adding or modifying functionality and quality to software is affected by several factors that have been traditionally analyzed under the terms “when to release” and “what to release”. Along the emergence of mobile apps, the release practices are changing. App stores are markets for many small sized software products which provide an open platform for users to express their opinions about using apps. The rise in popularity of mobile devices has led to a parallel growth in the size of the app store market, intriguing several research studies and commercial platforms on mining app stores. Large numbers of similar software products in a market make app design highly competitive. On the other side, app store reviews are currently the primary tool being used to analyze different aspects of app development and evolution. However, app users' feedback does not only occur on the app store. In fact, despite the mass quantity of posts that are made daily on social media, the importance and value that these discussions provide remain largely unused. While release management of software products has been long the subject of studies, mobile apps bring new opportunities and threats to the release practices. This thesis is a series of eight papers contributing to: - Understanding the opportunities and threats for release management of mobile apps. - Analyzing evolution of mobile apps over different releases. - Providing new formulation to integrate the opportunities of app stores into planning models. - Providing decision support for release management of mobile applications.engUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.Mobile appsRelease planningCrowd-sourcingData analyticsBig DataApp store miningEmpirical software engineeringComputer Sciencedoctoral thesis10.11575/PRISM/5456