Identifying Causal Relationships in Mobile App Issues: An Interval Type-2 Fuzzy DEMATEL Approach

Abstract

The software development industry is largely influenced by the growing popularity of mobile applications (apps). Mobile apps are dynamic; therefore, classical software development approaches cannot be applied in this context. Specific needs of the customers, technology up-gradation, battery economics, and other factors force app developers to introduce new apps into the market regularly. But due to the unavailability of formal and customized practices for app development, various issues occur in mobile apps. These issues may adversely affect the user acceptance of the end product. In this paper, we identify twelve critical issues in mobile apps. We further apply interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FS)-DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) method to analyze and divide these issues into cause and effect groups. It is evident from the results that various issues in mobile app development are interconnected and one issue can be the cause/effect of one or more issues. The compatibility issue is found to be the main causal issue initiating the impacts in other issues too. The next in the list is feature request and network connection issues. The objective of this research paper is twofold, firstly to identify the diverse issues related to the mobile apps, and secondly to successfully identify the severe issues where app development professionals and project managers could focus on. The results obtained by using the IT2FS-DEMATEL method are found to be consistent with other variants of DEMATEL.