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With the rise of social media like Twitter and of software distribution platforms like app stores, users got various ways to express their opinion about software products. Popular software vendors get user feedback thousandfold per day. Research has shown that such feedback contains valuable information for software development teams such as problem reports or feature and support inquires. Since the manual analysis of user feedback is cumbersome and hard to manage many researchers and tool vendors suggested to use automated analyses based on traditional supervised machine learning approaches. In this work, we compare the results of traditional machine learning and deep learning in classifying user feedback in English and Italian into problem reports, inquiries, and irrelevant. Our results show that using traditional machine learning, we can still achieve comparable results to deep learning, although we collected thousands of labels.

App stores allow users to give valuable feedback on apps, and developers to find this feedback and use it for the software evolution. However, finding user feedback that matches existing bug reports in issue trackers is challenging as users and developers often use a different language. In this work, we introduce DeepMatcher, an automatic approach using stateof-the-art deep learning methods to match problem reports in app reviews to bug reports in issue trackers. We evaluated DeepMatcher with four open-source apps quantitatively and qualitatively. On average, DeepMatcher achieved a hit ratio of 0.71 and a Mean Average Precision of 0.55. For 91 problem reports, DeepMatcher did not find any matching bug report.When manually analyzing these 91 problem reports and the issue trackers of the studied apps, we found that in 47 cases, users actually described a problem before developers discovered and documented it in the issue tracker. We discuss our findings and different use cases for DeepMatcher.

Successful open source communities are constantly looking for new members and helping them become active developers. A common approach for developer onboarding in open source projects is to let newcomers focus on relevant yet easy-to-solve issues to familiarize themselves with the code and the community. The goal of this research is twofold. First, we aim at automatically identifying issues that newcomers can resolve by analyzing the history of resolved issues by simply using the title and description of issues. Second, we aim at automatically identifying issues, that can be resolved by newcomers who later become active developers. We mined the issue trackers of three large open source projects and extracted natural language features from the title and description of resolved issues. In a series of experiments, we optimized and compared the accuracy of four supervised classifiers to address our research goals. Random Forest, achieved up to 91% precision (F1-score 72%) towards the first goal while for the second goal, Decision Tree achieved a precision of 92% (F1-score 91%). A qualitative evaluation gave insights on what information in the issue description is helpful for newcomers. Our approach can be used to automatically identify, label, and recommend issues for newcomers in open source software projects based only on the text of the issues.