Effort Estimation Approach through Extracting Use Cases via Informal Requirement Specifications

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors describe a use case extraction method using both semantic and syntactic analysis. Their method follows Fillmore's case grammar and Cockburn's goal modeling. 

The paper is well-structured and easy to follow. There are however some gaps in the text that require further explanation.

Section 1

• "...analyze requirements effectively. " Effective in what sense? Does accurately analysis of the language-oriented specifications in a given time considered effective? Please elaborate more on the notion of 'effectively.
• The authors should provide a real example to illustrate the problem they are tracking
• Cockburn’s Goal Use Case technique is not explained.

Section 2

The presented method should benefit from illustration of "real example" from the running text.

Section 3

It will be interesting to see examples showing where the methods failed. 

Section 4

The title of this section is misleading, there is not so much of a discussion here. It should be renamed "Conclusions and future work". 

 

Minor comments:- AI. Anton > Anton
- All occurrences of & in the text should be replaced with 'and', e.g: identify & analyze > identify and analyze
- References in the running text often only mentions the first author, when the reference include two authors, these should be specified, e.g.:
Ahn [2] > Ahn and Kim [2]
- concept of Goal > concept of goal
- The sentence "However, the original use case analysis is difficult to analyze the impact between use cases" should be rephrase.
- Chapter 2 ....Chapter 3 > Section 2... Section 3
- role m that > role that

Author Response

Section 1

Question 1) "...analyze requirements effectively. " Effective in what sense? Does accurately analysis of the language-oriented specifications in a given time considered effective? Please elaborate more on the notion of 'effectively.

Answer 1)  

=> We consider that use case approaches do not systematic way before.

    We fix it like "The primary purpose of these studies suggested to identify and analyze requirements theoretically because of analyzing no systematic way in existing use case approaches to handle non/functional requirements." in introduction section.

Q2) The authors should provide a real example to illustrate the problem they are tracking

A2) We make detailed example how to extract use case in table 10. 

 

Q3) Cockburn’s Goal Use Case technique is not explained.

A3) We add Cockburn’s Goal Use Case technique and what means use case in introduction section. 

Section 2

Q4) The presented method should benefit from illustration of "real example" from the running text.

A4) Please give me your question again with your detail opinion.

We don't know "from ... from running text".

 

Section 3

Q5) It will be interesting to see examples showing where the methods failed. 

A5) We make detailed example how to extract use case in table 10. We will make another paper about "method failed case".

 

Section 4

Q6) The title of this section is misleading, there is not so much of a discussion here. It should be renamed "Conclusions and future work". 

A6) We fix it as following your opinion.

 

Minor comments:- AI. Anton > Anton
Q7) All occurrences of & in the text should be replaced with 'and', e.g: identify & analyze > identify and analyze 

A7) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q8) References in the running text often only mentions the first author, when the reference include two authors, these should be specified, e.g.:
Ahn [2] > Ahn and Kim [2]

A8) They are different researchers with other papers. We fix it from Kim[] from J. Kim[]. 

Q9)

- concept of Goal > concept of goal

• The sentence "However, the original use case analysis is difficult to analyze the impact between use cases" should be rephrase. 
  - Chapter 2 ....Chapter 3 > Section 2... Section 3
  - role m that > role that

A9) We fix them as following your opinion.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is very interesting, presenting use of formal NLP models to extract use cases. The paper is suggested for publishing, but with modifications needed. The following suggested:

- language editing is needed (e.g. the first sentence of the Abstracti is too long, not comprehensible)

- explain what are use cases (enummerate) – in the Introduction part. Why it is important to extract them and how do you plan to use it?

- repeat this in the Conclusion

- remove personal information (e.g. in my SE Lab., his extraction methods). Besides, it would be better to say: In his research Author () used extraction methods based on….

- enlarge the Reference list, here are some suggestions:

Seljan, S.; Vučković, K.; Dovedan, Z. (2002). Sentence Representation in Context-Sensitive Grammars...

Formal grammars aim to formally describe natural language sentences. Seljan et al. (2002)present two context-sensitive grammars: Lexical-Functional Grammar and Case Grammar that aim to include semantic roles (such as agent, theme, beneficiary, goal, location, etc.) in order to represent the natural language sentences.

Be-bei Ye. (2016) Case Grammar and its Application in English Vocabulary Teaching….. 3d International Conference on Applied Social Science Research… - use of case grammar in language teaching

Seljan, S. (2006). The Role of the Lexicon in Lexical-Functional Grammar-Example on Croatian. – integration of semantic roles in the lexicon

FENG Zhi-wei. (2006). From Case Grammar to FrameNet. – use of Fillmore Grammar in language teaching

Seljan, S. (2003). Lexical-Functional Grammar of the Croatian Language: Theoretical and Practical Models – describes use of argument structure

Author Response

Question 1) language editing is needed (e.g. the first sentence of the Abstracti is too long, not comprehensible)

Answer 1) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q2) explain what are use cases (enummerate) – in the Introduction part. Why it is important to extract them and how do you plan to use it?

A2) We add use case concept in introduction section, and show detailed steps how to extract them in table 10. 

First need high level analysis(use case analysis) with user centered approach in software engineering. Second, need decomposition of the system. Third, predict Effort estimation.

Q3) repeat this in the Conclusion

A3) We mentioned it as following your opinion.

Q4) remove personal information (e.g. in my SE Lab., his extraction methods). Besides, it would be better to say: In his research Author () used extraction methods based on….

A4) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q5) enlarge the Reference list, here are some suggestions:

Seljan, S.; Vučković, K.; Dovedan, Z. (2002). Sentence Representation in Context-Sensitive Grammars...

Formal grammars aim to formally describe natural language sentences. Seljan et al. (2002)present two context-sensitive grammars: Lexical-Functional Grammar and Case Grammar that aim to include semantic roles (such as agent, theme, beneficiary, goal, location, etc.) in order to represent the natural language sentences.

Be-bei Ye. (2016) Case Grammar and its Application in English Vocabulary Teaching….. 3d International Conference on Applied Social Science Research… - use of case grammar in language teaching

Seljan, S. (2006). The Role of the Lexicon in Lexical-Functional Grammar-Example on Croatian. – integration of semantic roles in the lexicon

FENG Zhi-wei. (2006). From Case Grammar to FrameNet. – use of Fillmore Grammar in language teaching

Seljan, S. (2003). Lexical-Functional Grammar of the Croatian Language: Theoretical and Practical Models – describes use of argument structure

A5) We add their approaches into the introduction section.

But they never mention about how to apply requirement engineering with linguistic analysis.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors are dealing with the linguistic analysis. In this paper, the authors propose the use case extraction method using natural language analysis techniques and goal modeling. In order to understand natural language requirements, the authors offer an improvement of the Fillmore’s model of case grammar and goal modeling.

In order to ensure the quality of the software, we must analyze the natural language-oriented requirement specifications at the beginning of software development. A correct analysis of the requirement specifications will eliminate software errors and reduce software development costs.

But in real software projects, it is difficult to perform requirement specification analysis with linguistic and textual analysis alone. To overcome this problem, Park and Kim propose an effective linguistic analysis method to extract use cases on informal requirement specifications, which adapts requirement engineering with the semantic analysis of the Fillmore’s textual approach. They suggest extracting use cases and calculating the software effort estimation with the use-case point method.

The development of the method proposed by the authors is applied to a postal mail system.

The motivation and justification of the work are appropriate. The paper is well written in correct English. I have only found some typographical errors in the References.

The style of the references should be unified (e.g., authors' last names and first initials).

In ref. 4,
For: Information Systems Lecture Notes
read: Information Systems. Lecture Notes

For: Vil.3136
read: Vol.3136

In ref. 7,
For: C.J. Fillmore. The Case for Case. Universals in Linguistic Theory, Bach&Harms Eds, New York: Holt, Rinehart&Winston, 1967.
read: Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The Case for Case. Universals in Linguistic Theory, ed. by Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms, 1-88. New York. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Syntax-Semantics Interface in Psych-verb Constructions (2341), 201, 100363-76.

In ref. 11,
For: Abbott R. J. Program Design by Informal English Descriptions. Communication. ACM, pp. 882-894, Nov, 1982.
read: Abbott, R. J. (1983). Program Design by Informal English Descriptions. Communications of the ACM, 26(11), 882-894.

In ref. 12,
For: University of Hongik, 2013.
read: University of Hongik, South Korea, 2013.

In ref. 13,
For: Park, B.K.; Yang, H.S.; Kim, R.Y.C. A Method to Identify Goal Use-Case(s) with Refined Fillmore’s Case Grammar. The 40th Conference of the KIPS, Vol.20, No.2, Nov, 2013.
Park, B., Yang, H., & Kim, R. Y. (2013). A Method to Identify Goal Use-Case(s) with Refined Fillmore's Case Grammar. In Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference (pp. 1011-1014). Korea Information Processing Society.

In ref. 14,
For: Karner Gustav. Resource Estimation for Objectoru Projects. Objective Systems SF AB, 1993.
read: Karner, G. (1993). Resource estimation for objectory projects. Objective Systems SF AB, 17, 1-9.

Author Response

The style of the references should be unified (e.g., authors' last names and first initials).

Question 1)
In ref. 4,
For: Information Systems Lecture Notes 
read: Information Systems. Lecture Notes

Answer 1) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q2) For: Vil.3136
read: Vol.3136

A2) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q3) In ref. 7,
For: C.J. Fillmore. The Case for Case. Universals in Linguistic Theory, Bach&Harms Eds, New York: Holt, Rinehart&Winston, 1967.
read: Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The Case for Case. Universals in Linguistic Theory, ed. by Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms, 1-88. New York. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Syntax-Semantics Interface in Psych-verb Constructions (2341), 201, 100363-76.

A3) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q4) In ref. 11,
For: Abbott R. J. Program Design by Informal English Descriptions. Communication. ACM, pp. 882-894, Nov, 1982.
read: Abbott, R. J. (1983). Program Design by Informal English Descriptions. Communications of the ACM, 26(11), 882-894.

A4) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q5) In ref. 12,
For: University of Hongik, 2013.
read: University of Hongik, South Korea, 2013.

A5) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q6) In ref. 13,
For: Park, B.K.; Yang, H.S.; Kim, R.Y.C. A Method to Identify Goal Use-Case(s) with Refined Fillmore’s Case Grammar. The 40th Conference of the KIPS, Vol.20, No.2, Nov, 2013.
Park, B., Yang, H., & Kim, R. Y. (2013). A Method to Identify Goal Use-Case(s) with Refined Fillmore's Case Grammar. In Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference (pp. 1011-1014). Korea Information Processing Society.

A6) We fix it as following your opinion.

Q7) In ref. 14,
For: Karner Gustav. Resource Estimation for Objectoru Projects. Objective Systems SF AB, 1993.
read: Karner, G. (1993). Resource estimation for objectory projects. Objective Systems SF AB, 17, 1-9.

A7) We fix it as following your opinion.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx