PONE-D-19-25986

Model-based test case prioritization using selective and even-spread count-based methods with scrutinized ordering criterion

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wan-Kadir,

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Seyed Reza Shahamiri

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

• One of my observation is the problem statement and emphasis on regression testing execution costs, and the claim that 80% of the testing costs are spent on reg. testing execution. With modern unit test frameworks, the execution cost of regression testing doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore as the framework simply re-runs the predefined tests. It’s better that the authors further elaborate/revise the problem statement.

• There are some inconsistencies between the reference styles used. For example, page 3 last paragraph, “Yoo and Harman (1)…” while others use []. Please fix this issue.

• Please improve the English.

• How does the proposed approach compared with machine learning based test case generation/prioritizations technique? It would be good if the paper addresses this.

• How does the proposed approach address the oracle problem?

• I’m not sure of whether the authors have made all the data available, or provided enough detail for another researcher to reproduce the findings. Can you please clarify?

• I noted that the validation of the method presented in this manuscript might be incomplete. Whilst the performance has been compared to other existing methods, I’m unsure whether the methods chosen for comparison are state-of-the-art, and thus the results may not have been put in the right context. Please clarify this too.

• The structure of the paper is not adequate for a research paper. It seems the paper is written in a way a thesis should be written, especially section 5. I advise the authors to restructure the paper in a manner that is more acceptable for research papers rather than a thesis such as, Abstract, Introduction, Related work, Method, Experiments, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: 1. The objective of this research is to propose an MB-TCP approach that can improve the faults detection performance of regression testing. A detailed empirical study is conducted with the aims to evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed approach with the selected existing approaches from the literature using the average of the percentage of faults detected (APFD) metric. Three web applications were used. From the result obtained, the proposed approach yields the highest APFD values over other existing approaches which are 91%, 86% and 91% respectively for the three web applications.

2. Introduction section is very lengthy. Some information pertaining to the research is better to be discussed in section 4.

3. In am not sure what is the different between section 2 and 3. This is because both sections has similar contents. The background section should be more general, while the related work should cover the works that are applied in the current research

4. The heading of section 4 is proposed MB-TCP approach. It is confusing as prior to this, it was mentioned in section 3 that MB-TCP approach is an existing approach. To reduce the confusion, heading for section 4 is better as “proposed approach”

5. The authors did not explain why they have selected the three websites only. Justification needed.

6. The main issue that forms the basis for research is the high execution cost. However, the authors did not perform testing of their proposed method on the execution cost. This is the biggest limitation of this research. We cannot determine the effectiveness of the proposed approach in relation to the execution cost as it is major issue highlighted in the abstract.

7. The sample size is based on the number of websites. However, each website has different line of command. I think it is better to use line of code as research unit rather than the website itself.

8. The use of Shapiro–Wilk test for hypothesis testing is questionable. The null hypothesis is that there are no differences between the APFD values from the existing MB-TCP approaches using FSM and SESOC. However, Shapiro–Wilk test is to test the normality. The finding suggests that that SESOC is not normally distributed. It did not suggest that they are different. The authors should use ANOVA as described in section 4.

9. Figures are off poor quality and cannot be comprehended. Some figures are missing from the document.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Mumtaz Begum Mustafa, Ph.D.

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Model-based test case prioritization using selective and even-spread count-based methods with scrutinized ordering criterion

PONE-D-19-25986R1

Dear Dr. Wan-Kadir,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

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With kind regards,

Seyed Reza Shahamiri

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Mumtaz Begum Mustafa