Tools 1st referee's comments

     A) Overall Recommendation:
     - Weak Accept
     
     B) Confidence in your rating:
     - Confident, but I am not an expert
     
     C) Main field(s) of the paper:
     - Concurrency and distribution
     
     D) Strengths of the paper:
     - important topic for TOOLS USA
     - Innovative results
     - Increasingly important for practitioners
     - Adequate English considering a foreign speaker
     
     E)  Drawbacks of the paper:
     - See specific comments below.
     - Somewhat long for the content.
     - Not always clear
     
     F)  General comments:
     
     G)  Detailed comments to the Author:
     - 1.1.2 First sentence. Also cite Booch 91 and Firesmith 93.
     - 1.1.2 Last sentence. Not justified if regression testing is 
     automated.
     - 1.2.3 b Dining philosophers use chopsticks on rice, not forks!!! It 
     is critical that a single utensil is not adequate to eat. With forks, 
     there is far less potential for dead-lock and starvation. Also, this 
     design is less useful and likely in a language (like C++) that does 
     not support concurrency.
     - 2.1.2a Synchronizaton Do your mean synchronous (synchronizing two 
     threads like an Ada rendesvouz) or sequential (involving only a single 
     thread like C++)?
     - 2.1.3 last paragraph. Needs better, clearer explaination as to why 
     messages do not define a syntactic scope.

Table of contents, Referee comments


Marc Girod
Last modified: Sat Feb 28 14:25:48 EET 1998