Can Defect Prediction Be Useful for Coarse-Level Tasks of Software Testing?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper proposes DPAHM (a DP-based association hierarchy method using incidence matrix and analytic hierarchy process), to assist in resource allocation for coarse-level tasks.
Overall, the paper describes important results and offers developers and testers significant contributions.
However, the paper needs improvement in describing in more detail the proposed approach. Specifically, sections 3.2, 3.3 should be better explained (and they should clarify the relationship between the *phases* and the *steps*).
What exactly is MC? A few more details about this "proprietary software" would help the reader understand better how the proposed approach was applied.
The reviewer agrees with the authors in that a good future research direction would be providing resource allocation strategies for the coarse-level tasks of complex software.
The most important critique of this paper relates to the quality of the presentation. English proof-reading is absolutely necessary. (There are many sentences without a predicate and numerous typos.)
#One more observation: while it may be too late to change it, the title sounds somewhat vague, too general. The contributions of the paper are important, but the title does not do enough to highlight these contributions.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your good comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Can Defect Prediction Be Useful for Coarse-Level Tasks of Software Testing?” (ID:applsci-876916). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with apporoval.
The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as following (Please see the attachment). We tried our best to improve the manuscript and made some changes in the manuscript. These changes will not influence the content and framework of the paper.
Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper reports an approach to assist on arranging resources for coarse-grained tasks of software testing. The topic of the paper is relevant and falls within the journal scope. The paper is well structured and self-contained, and includes an appropriate number of references. The proposal is original and reasonable. The authors included a case study to validate their approach.
On the negative side, there are a lot of typos and grammar mistakes throughout the paper. For this reason, it should be carefully reviewed by an English native speaker to improve the language standard.
I miss more information about the dimensions of the software used in the validation (MC), such as lines of code (LOC) or other alternative metric.
While the authors included a detailed, low-level explanation of their method, I would like to have a more clear idea of the general context of use. How DPAHM could be integrated in the whole software development lifecycle?
I recommend the authors to report how DPAHM manages or takes into account test case specifications and software requirements specifications. Since tests are normally linked to requirements, it's important to understand the possible traceability relationships that could take part between specifications and DPAHM method artifacts.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your good comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Can Defect Prediction Be Useful for Coarse-Level Tasks of Software Testing?” (ID:applsci-876916). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with apporoval.
The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as following (Please see the attachment). We tried our best to improve the manuscript and made some changes in the manuscript. These changes will not influence the content and framework of the paper.
Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
